K-pop fever rises as 8th Fact Music Awards drops star-studded lineup
Launched in 2019 by Fan N STAR, TMA has quickly become one of the most exciting fixtures in the K-pop calendar, honouring top Korean artists who have taken the global music scene by storm. What sets TMA apart? The electric energy of its live performances, and this year's show – to be held at the Macao Outdoor Performance Venue – promises nothing less than a full-scale audio-visual spectacle.
The initial artist reveal, shared via a tweet from the organisers, features a mix of rising talent and crowd favourites. Leading the pack is NCT Wish, whose precision choreography and stage charisma have made them a group to watch in 2024. Also returning is NMIXX, fresh off a milestone moment with their hit Love Me Like This racking up over 100mn views on YouTube.
Joining them are the breakout stars Hearts2Hearts and KiiiKiiii – two debut groups that stunned fans with their high-energy performances and walked away with trophies at the Seoul 2025 Awards. The buzz around their TMA debut is real, with fans hoping this stage will be the next big leap in their skyrocketing careers.
If you've got The Chase, Songbird, I Do Me, or Nice Guy on repeat, you're in for a treat – all signs point to these chart-toppers rocking the stage come September.
With more names expected to be announced soon, the countdown has officially begun. And if history is any indicator, the 2025 edition of TMA is gearing up to be a night of glitter, grooves, and jaw-dropping performances that fans across continents won't want to miss.
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Observer
2 days ago
- Observer
How literature lost its mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of bestselling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and JD Salinger. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now. I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanising effect on our culture. There used to be a sense that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the Internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. The decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Internet was dominant. People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell's '1984' (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' has sold over 20 million. People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' and Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead.' It's just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed. I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years. In the 1970s, artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there was Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye,' Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' and Saul Bellow's 'Humboldt's Gift.' In movies there was 'The Godfather' — I and II — and 'Apocalypse Now.' Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'Free Bird' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialised, bureaucratised and less freewheeling today. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.) Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You're not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe's words, to stand 'firm and alone.' Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage. If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you're going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You'll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won't make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won't want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you cancelled. Most important, if you don't have raw social courage, you're not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what's going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America. We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side. Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn't give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can't match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature's comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanisation all around us. — The New York Times
Muscat Daily
08-07-2025
- Muscat Daily
K-pop fever rises as 8th Fact Music Awards drops star-studded lineup
Seoul – K-pop fans, mark your calendars! The 8th edition of the Fact Music Awards (TMA) is turning up the volume this year with its highly anticipated return on September 9 – and the first artist lineup has already sent the Internet into overdrive. Launched in 2019 by Fan N STAR, TMA has quickly become one of the most exciting fixtures in the K-pop calendar, honouring top Korean artists who have taken the global music scene by storm. What sets TMA apart? The electric energy of its live performances, and this year's show – to be held at the Macao Outdoor Performance Venue – promises nothing less than a full-scale audio-visual spectacle. The initial artist reveal, shared via a tweet from the organisers, features a mix of rising talent and crowd favourites. Leading the pack is NCT Wish, whose precision choreography and stage charisma have made them a group to watch in 2024. Also returning is NMIXX, fresh off a milestone moment with their hit Love Me Like This racking up over 100mn views on YouTube. Joining them are the breakout stars Hearts2Hearts and KiiiKiiii – two debut groups that stunned fans with their high-energy performances and walked away with trophies at the Seoul 2025 Awards. The buzz around their TMA debut is real, with fans hoping this stage will be the next big leap in their skyrocketing careers. If you've got The Chase, Songbird, I Do Me, or Nice Guy on repeat, you're in for a treat – all signs point to these chart-toppers rocking the stage come September. With more names expected to be announced soon, the countdown has officially begun. And if history is any indicator, the 2025 edition of TMA is gearing up to be a night of glitter, grooves, and jaw-dropping performances that fans across continents won't want to miss.
Muscat Daily
06-07-2025
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Blackpink's Comeback Begins: ‘Jump' Debuts on Deadline Tour
By OUR CORRESPONDENT South Korea – 'Blackpink in your area': This tag line sending many K-pop fans wild with excitement. Blackpink is more than a girl group — they're a real movement, a lifestyle, a cultural phenomenon. Since their debut in 2016, the South Korean girl group Blackpink has risen to become one of the top pop exports worldwide — and they are not just traveling the globe as musicians. Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa take on alternating roles as fashion icons, brand ambassadors and influencers, too. Their 'Deadline World Tour,' which will whisk them across the globe on the big stage, has kicked off on July 5. Blackpink made a powerful return to the stage with the debut of their new song 'Jump' — their first fresh track in over two years — during the opening night of the 'Deadline' world tour at the Goyang Sports Complex in Gyeonggi on Saturday. The unreleased song gave fans an exciting glimpse into the group's long-awaited comeback, marking their first major release since the 'Born Pink' album in September 2022. (Excluding the 2023 single 'The Girls' from their mobile game soundtrack.) The Goyang concert launched a massive world tour that will take the quartet to 31 shows across 16 cities worldwide.
