The Fans and Gods of ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ | Kevin Power
“This is what it sounds like…” Readers of a certain generation will perhaps automatically complete this phrase by saying “when doves cry.” But it isn’t doves we’re talking about. It’s magpies. Prince’s funky epic of tortured love (“Why do we scream at each other?”) forms part of the extensive pop-culture back catalog ransacked by the market-savvy makers of the animated Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters. At the movie’s climax Rumi, one of the eponymous demon hunters, sings a not un-Prince-like song called “What It Sounds Like.” No agonized eroticism, à la Prince. Rather, ingenuous self-acceptance: “My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.” For certain parents, this might be what it sounds like when children cry. Last September Dr. Colleen Ryan of the Shriners Children’s Hospital in Boston issued a warning about the dangers of speedily consuming boiling-hot ramen noodles in homage to a KPop Demon Hunters scene. Children had, it seemed, been microwaving tall, slender cups of instant ramen and spilling the contents on themselves with alarming regularity. In her statement …
