The Korean offered some Korean indie music history as he selected PiPi Band/Pipi Long Stocking as number 50 on his 50 Most Influential K-Pop Artists list: 50 Most Influential K-Pop Artists: 50. Pipi Band/Pipi Longstocking.
Although I was more or less completely unaware of the existence of any kind of alternative music – let alone independent stuff – at the time, Pipi Long Stocking was my first encounter with non-mainstream Korean music. I was big on Seo Taiji & The Boys back then, after a friend had traded her copy of Goodbye Best Album for a bunch of N’Sync and/or Backstreet Boys posters, and doing some after school Internet surfing I came across a fan site dedicated to both bands. I can’t recall if I ever actually listened to Pipi Long Stocking (If I did I probably thought it too weird to let it load more than a few seconds. Those things took a lot of time in 1997 – time I’d rather spend buffering H.O.T. music videos in tiny resolution as I was in the middle of changing BSB for H.O.T. as my definite favorite boy band), but I remember thinking it was incredibly cool that some Korean band had taken the name from a character in a Swedish children’s book.