Will BoA be the first Asian pop star to reach super-stardom in the United States? The short answer: No, but it won’t be for a lack of trying.

The long answer: Anyone who has a basic knowledge of J-Pop or K-Pop music knows who BoA is. If you don’t, here’s a brief synopsis: A 12 year old Korean girl auditions and gets drafted into the Korean music scene. She becomes huge in South Korea, then promptly goes to Japan and records a bunch of #1 Japanese records, making her the first Korean to do so. She promptly becomes a superstar all over Asia. Now BoA is 20 and there are dreams for her to make it big in the United States. Don’t they all, really? But this will be easier said than done, because — and let’s be brutally honest here, because I’m actually a really big fan of BoA since her Kimochi Wa Tsutamaru days — the girl can’t pronounce her Rs.

No, seriously. Take this song, performed by teen fashion dolls turned bad pop band Bratz, for example: I played this for my ex once and when BoA butchered the line “All the Girls” as “ARR DE GURRS,” I lost car radio privileges for the next two years.

So now BoA is giving another go at it with her new single “Eat You Up,” and the big guns have been called: the song is produced by Bloodshy & Avant, who produced another song you may have heard of called “Toxic,” by Britney Spears. Her video producer is Diane Martel. And Flo Rida is rapping on one of the remixes.

If I was the agent of a pop star, those are the names I would want to be using, really. But at the end of the day, the great American music machine is more than that — it’s promotion, it’s going to radio stations, it’s going to TRL and having 15 year olds from New Jersey being able to love you through an accent and a lot of peace signs. And it’s a shame, because she has the image skills, she definitely has the dancing skills and watching an exhausted-looking BoA learning hip hop moves and auditioning dancers and dealing with Americans that speak 100-words-a-minute, she most definitely has the drive and the work ethic. And it’s for those reasons that I really want her to do well when her single comes out in digital format on October 7th.

But given the track record of Asian in the American music industry? I’m not holding my breath. At all. Here’s to vocoders and chest pops taking you to the top, girl. Vocoders and chest pops.

Dear Amy,

I’ve always prided myself on being a fan of yours; my ex got me listening to your first album Frank when you weren’t anorexic and you didn’t have any tattoos or freaky beehive hairdos. When I learned you were working with Mark Ronson I was thrilled, and when you won a Grammy in the brief moment you were sober or not [noticeably] on crack I turned to my friends and said, “see? I could totally be an A&R guy,” even though I’m in tech and, let’s face it, I could NEVER be an A&R guy.

And then you became a mess. A hot, tragic mess.

Now I hear about the video about you going off doing some racist sing-song rant, singing about Paki’s, Chinks and Nips and pulling back your eyes in front of a video camera to your rockstar-lifestyle boyfriend. And here’s the thing: seeing as I started a blog called 8asians.com, keyword Asians, this is usually the part where I wave my arms at how outrageous and inappropriate a remark like that is, and how shocked and appalled I am as an Asian American to see entertainers engaging in this type of behavior, blah blah fuckity blah.

As an Asian, I’m kinda like, “yeah, that’s fucked.” As a Winehouse fan, I’m all, “Girl, YOU’RE SINGING THIS FROM A CRACKHOUSE.”

Making fun of Amy Winehouse nowadays is like making fun of Whitney Houston three or four years ago: the “crack is whack” meme was hilarious for a while, but the story would get more tragic in passing. When it gets to the point that you see photos of her cracked out in a fur coat at a gas station at two in the morning and all you can really say is something like, “man, I hope she finds Jesus.” And I’m Agnostic.

With Amy, it’s the same thing. I would say something like “I’m so offended I’ll never listen to your music again,” but that’s not really true, because you were probably so twacked out you have absolutely no recollection of saying it, and there are other perfectly legit reasons why I may never listen to your stuff again: you keep getting dropped from labels, and the stuff you HAVE been doing sounds a little lackluster. (Your cover of “Cupid” is still good, but seriously, it sounds like you’re hitting the bottle between takes.) I would keep writing, but it really just depresses the living hell out of me.

Amy Winehouse, from one non-religious person to another: you need to find Jesus. That is all.

The sample chapter I’m writing this week is I sat down to check my email, and woke up watching kitten videos: Internet addiction time warps.

I’d love to hear your stories of your worst web time warps, and why you think the internet has the ability to suck your time out of your hands until you find yourself at 4am thinking “Wait, is it Tuesday? Where have I been?”

Oh, man. The biggest time sucks I’ve ever had consist of YouTube clips of “So You Think You Can Dance.”

That’s right, the campy dance version of FOX’s American Idol. That in itself is only slightly humiliating, but combined with the power of YouTube has single-handedly brought down hours of sleep and/or productivity. What? Through the power of Wikipedia, I’ve learned that Greece, Australia and Germany have their own version of the show? Well, I HAVE to watch ALL of the performances. ALL OF THEM. I mean, they’re only two minutes.

And that’s where the time suck comes, I suppose. You’re watching two minute performances, but you’re watching DOZENS AND DOZENS of two minute performances. Same goes for Wikipedia. It only takes a minute or two to scan an article, but then you see a link and it’s so EASY to click on it and learn more information about reality shows in Germany and/or Austria, that you glance at the clock and it’s already three in the morning.

Watching thirteen year old girls fight on YouTube come in at a close second.

(I’ll let you know that I just spent the past hour looking at MORE SYTYCD videos. And I think it may be time for me to start going unwired as well.)

Anil: http://snoopdogg.com/player/default.aspx?mid=3578&bhcp=1

Ernie: oh no. the first second…
Anil: you has no idea
Ernie: he hasn’t even started performing yet
Anil: i’m telling you
Anil: it’s beyond anything you can imagine
Anil: i’m writing a book-length post on it now
Ernie: [watching now]
Ernie: …
Anil: YOU LOVE IT
Ernie: OMFG THERE’S A WIND MACHINE
Anil: you ain’t seen shit
Ernie: i am honest to god speechless
Anil: i win! i think it’s so special

Ernie: did they fucking put PCP in his weed?
Anil: no they put GENIUS in it.
Anil: this is why he’s snoop dogg

Ernie: this is on level with ice cube starring in kids movies, except… completely not
Anil: right
Anil: cube went soft
Anil: like, eddie murphy soft
Anil: meanwhile snoop got even more real
Anil: he’s like “yeah, i used to kill people. now look at my round bed in space.”

Her video, and my commentary, after the jump.

00:12: The stage is set: man and a woman leave their car to have a responsible Christian conversation between adults that absolutely, positively, will NOT end up in a total make-out session. Also, for no apparent reason, Amy Grant is, like, three inches tall.

00:36: By now, it’s known that there are thousands – THOUSANDS – of Amy Grants. Amy Grants frolicking in the grass, Amy Grant’s dancing around pebbles. Kind of like wood nymphs, except conservative Christians don’t believe in nudity, so the wood nymphs are wearing a sensible Oxford shirt.

01:17: Christ, it’s barely a minute into the song and there’s already a key change? How many modulations ARE there in this song?

02:19: Wow. For a woman, she kinda runs like a gay man, don’t you think? Note that up to this point, there hasn’t been one SHRED of affection between the man and the woman in the video. For all we know, they’re talking about they’re talking about genocide in Rwanda or mutual funds or something morbid and serious…

02:31: …until NOW. RIDE ‘IM, COWGIRL! WHOO!

02:46: NO, AMY GRANT, NOOOOOOOOO! (Director: “Amy, I know it’s tough because you’re in front of a blue screen, but can you act like you’re avoiding being stepped on by a 100-foot woman? If it’ll help with the acting, it will be a woman minutes before she’s going to have pre-marital sex.”)

02:57: Oh, no. Here we go… here’s where the flood of angry members of Focus On the Family is going to start a mass boycott of all Amy Grant songs, videos, merchandising and concerts. Good-bye, promotion with Target. Goodbye, inspirational show called “Three Wishes” that briefly aired on NBC.

03:23: It should be said that at this point in the video, they’ve kissed around six or seven times. And growing up in the church, we all know that kissing gets you pregnant so she’s totally knocked up by now. Serves that heathen right.

03:28: No pillow talk. What a whore.

03:54: Oh damn, the video is practically over and I didn’t even realize that she was sporting white Adidases. Which totally MATCH her summer dress, by the way.

In other words, you can import any video game character or stage into your own special fight game. Oh, how I wish I were still decent at fighting games. This can lead to some very awesome combinations:

And some… uhm… not so great ones.

(Note: You should REALLY wait until the 30 second mark, because the song HAS LYRICS. It’s so awful that I’ve now played this video twelve times in a row.)

Then YouTube became big, and we all got sidetracked watching girl fights. (By the way, I don’t recommend you clicking on that link, lest you want to spend the next three and a half hours watching video of girl fights. I suddenly have an urge to punch a 14-year old girl in the face.*)

No matter. It might have reduced the average Internet consumer to watching TV on a computer screen instead of on a television set, but I for one embrace our video, pop-culture overlords. Take for example, this video of a gay Latino New Yorker dancing along to a K-Pop video (which, for the record, is AWESOME):

And this is why I love YouTube. Could this scenario have happen five years ago? Technically, sure, but inserting a flash applet of a 20-year old doing the shimmy to a Korean song is so much easier. And I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more pop-culture references on this version of the weblog because of it.

* Just kidding, Dad