K-pop (2015)

OK I take it back, that AOA song is gr8.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7UVf26KS0

This might be the most generic Sistar has ever been

definitely their worst summer song. is it just me or has this year been pretty poor, singles-wise, for established girl groups?
4minute is the big exception that comes to mind immediately.

The big clash of girl groups this summer is turning into an anticlimax, for sure. If SNSD can deliver something semi-decent they'll stand out. There's still Nine Muses to come too.

check out some puke: http://www.k-pendium.com/004/

Is Nan Arayo really that flawed? The instrumentals seem pretty dedicated to underscoring the vocals, so the song sounds pretty tight and purposeful to me. And the sudden genre shifts stop it from sounding dated.

I hope someone can tell you were that East! Coast! sample comes from.

Nan Arayo still sounds like it could be released today. The chorus is so k-pop even on its own.

maybe i was looking in the wrong places, but i really did put some time into trying to place that bit. '92 was pretty early into the whole east coast west coast thing, but i scoped all the public enemy, run-d.m.c. etc i could, even that one footnote of a chuck d cosplay loser who fired shots in like '91 or '92...no dice. not sure, but kinda incredible how the legacy of meaningless east coast/west coast repping in k-pop continues to this day ("woof woof" by shinee, for one).

and yeah, i really do think "nan arayo" is pretty awful. it's charming for its melody and its ambition, but it just sounds like such a trainwreck to me. (interesting, though, sure.) the fact that it could be released today is more a testament to its influence than its quality, it's tough to find k-pop songs that jumbled nowadays, even messier examples like that jjcc "fire" song or that blady "oochie walla" song hang together better. there's some nice stuff on that first album, but i don't think STJ reaaaaaally got his shit together until recently. (Quiet Night is awesome)

Unrelated to the song at all but man it's a real shame that Snowpiercer is the Bong Joon-Ho movie that people know when I find it to be the worst thing in his filmography aside from maybe his debut. Then again, it makes sense re: distribution, it being in English, having star power in Evans, Swinton, and Bell.

Anyways, coming from someone who got into K-pop because of Seo Taiji, I obviously think Nan Arayo is a pretty great song. Kind of shocked you don't dig it, what other songs do you like more on the debut? "이 밤이 깊어가지만" is the only other one I revisit anymore. (In fact the only other kpop song I listen to from this time is this). I assume there won't be many posts of early/mid 90s kpop songs you like if you didn't like "Nan Arayo"? I find the worst thing in the song to actually be the vocal performance albeit it's a bit endearing in its amateurishness. Pretty understandable though as to why anyone wouldn't like it, or anything Seo Taiji did. If there's anything about his music that reflects contemporary K-pop aside from genre mish mashing it's how late he was to certain trends ;)

The article is nicely written and definitely informative but kind of baffled by how you said the intro of the song is like Tangerine Dream? Just because a synthesized string is played for a short amount of time doesn't mean it's close to any sort of kosmische music. If an artist or producer actually cited them as influences then I'd be kind of shocked.

Don't mean to be a downer though, excited for this project still of course. Are you not gonna be talking about anything that happened pre-Nan Arayo then for the K-pendium?

Snowpiercer is pretty great but obviously The Host should have Jaws like respect by now. Also I think about it a lot when I read MERS-news from Korea.

Snowpiercer is awesome but i probably like The Host more. Snowpiercer just pertains to the point more directly.

i like plenty of '90s shit! "nan arayo" is just a mess. and yeah as i wrote, vocal perf is wack, but the melodies are distinctive and as close as "arayo" gets to the greatness of later STJ. off that first album, i'm away from my itunes but i dig the vanilla-ice-inspired-but-actually-good ballad, the one that always reminds me of "bizarre love triangle," and the "missing" closer which is slight but sweet. maybe one or two more.

and lol you're good, T Dream was the one reference i stressed the most about. it reminds me of the worst of their late '80s stuff, cheesy synth string melodrama, but there's definitely a much better point of comparison that i'm just not hearing. STJ listened pretty broadly back then, from what i understand of some recent reading i've been doing...but i too would have to doubt that's where he learned that particular vibe. could honestly just be some more dramatic new jack swing tune but i need to do more research-hearing before i can sub in something likelier.

and the next entry is pre-"nan" by many decades!

Shin Jung-hyeon then? And all the associated artists presumably. I think I mentioned this earlier but "Now" is my favorite Korean album maybe ever

Oh and yea Snowpiercer makes sense for the article, just sort of expressing how it's the only film westerners know from him and how I find that frustrating when I love his other films so much. (I could complain about Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk's popularity but that's another story)

Can you cite the sort of stuff Seo Taiji was listening to or were there no specifics mentioned in what you read? I'm definitely interested in that sort of info but a part of me is really skeptical considering the sort of music he made (because obviously he listened to nu-metal and then pop punk/emo to make Ultramania and then 7th Issue). I also feel like this might be a similar case to that ASAP Rocky piece in Billboard recently where Mark Ronson was saying how Rocky's "musical knowledge runs far and wide" and then they namedrop Tame Impala, Portishead, Massive Attack, T. Rex, The Stooges, and The Kinks.

I think the biggest question is: did the collage of sounds/genres that appears in "Nan Arayo" even exist in korean art throughout the 90s and early 2000s?

To say Nan Arayo affected the way directors approached film seems really misguided, especially when Korean films were no way like that in the 90s at all and still aren't like that. Like there's Snowpiercer and Save the Green Planet! (2005), maybe The Quiet Family (1998), and a few mainstream comedies that toy with that but they're 1) not common and 2) feel representative of stuff going on elsewhere (e.g. Takashi Miike, Sion Sono, "Holy Motors"). And even then, the sort of gags/humor present in those movies are pretty standard for Korean humor. I highly doubt Bong Joon-ho was influenced by K-pop or its effects in any way, especially when we have interviews where he cites his influences (sci-fi films and comic books). Seo Taiji didn't have a hand in the works of other artists in the way Shin Jung-hyeon or Hosono did nor did he have an immediate effect on the musical landscape of korean popular music w/r/t this specific collage of disparate sounds. I mean, Les Rallizes Denudes had monumental influence on the Japanese underground (and the film/music/theater people during this time influenced each other and were friends). Seo Taiji doesn't even come close to that immediate influence and he was a huge pop star.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuAcCLQPk0

alt link

I *knew* this was one of their Japanese songs!

It sounds better in Japanese with this lighter-touch mix, honestly (though it's still just okay).

Weren't synth melodramatics a staple of late-80s Japanese Bubble music?

Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIVGQ-B9G38

Of course, Tangerine Dream could have been an early influence of the Jpop songwriters who incorporated synths, but I was under the impression that this sound was widespread in the late 80s.

WonderGirls are coming back

!!!

Super exciting! Apparently Sohee isn't participating but oh well.

With Sunmi? Is it confirmed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6KN_OQC-oM

I used to watch this every day

yes with sunmi

<3

JYP Entertainment has responded to the reports on June 23: “Nothing related to Wonder Girls’ comeback has been decided. We are aware that Sunye has returned to Korea for personal reasons. It is not for the preparation of Wonder Girls’ comeback.”

welp

"To say Nan Arayo affected the way directors approached film seems really misguided, especially when Korean films were no way like that in the 90s at all and still aren't like that."

contesting these claims in reverse order: there is certainly a strong mainstream presence of films built around the schizoid recombinant logic ("this should be a mess, but it's not") that "nan arayo" ("this is a mess; this was MJ-huge??") introduced to korea in a record-breakingly massive way. of course it's not the only thing going, or even at any given time the main thing (i.e., just like there are several "call me baby" for every "ice cream cake" – though hey, the latter is much more popular here), but it's definitely the only definitively/originally "Korean" thing you can find in modern Korean pop culture, especially at a top-tier mainstream level. Secretly Greatly is the best recent example of this in film that i've yet encountered, both in terms of content and box office success. it's almost nauseating at times, how fast it jerks between genres, but in the end it works beautifully. i'm not a huge film buff broadly speaking but I've definitely never encountered anything remotely close to that outside of Korea...would be happy to earmark a few specific films if you watch Secretly and feel like it's channeling something else altogether, though I have to say I doubt it.

as for "no way like that in the 90s at all," I will never realistically find time to do the viewing to investigate that myself, but that's not a point my article makes nor one that apprehends how influence works. Seo's influence in Korean pop was immediate and massive, no doubt (future K-Pendiums to prove it...), but it was those whom it influenced who really entrenched it and made it second nature (as with your example in Japan's underground w/r/t Les Rallizes). have you listened much to HOT and SES' albums of the '90s? there is some deeeeeeeply weird, multi-directional stuff there that channels the STJ impulse and pushes it even further (and, most the time, worse). the real point is not that fuckin Bong Joon-ho pumps "Nan Arayo" in the shower every morning, but that the songwriters and execs most influenced by that song went on to repeat and iterate its eccentricities to the point that they became part of Korea's pop lingua franca (and it is deeply ingrained! you can meet SM songwriters or Ko Ah-sung or whoever and many of these people just are not even remotely cognizant of how weird and out there some of their mainstream/their own material gets). also if you count an artist's publicly acknowledged influences as their sole influences (re: "I highly doubt Bong Joon-ho was influenced by K-pop or its effects in any way, especially when we have interviews where he cites his influences"), well...

in any event, I'm adding a sentence to the post now to make this distinction a little bit clearer!

also, STJ had a less direct but certainly much much deeper hand in the influence of other major artists vs. Shin Jung-hyeon, can't say the same for Hosono though 'cause YMO y'know (also a huge influence on STJ, actually, though not so audibly on "Arayo"). to say " Seo Taiji doesn't even come close to that immediate influence" is just nah

@hurricane sure, but those are veeeeery diff "synth melodramatics" vs. the ones in the "Arayo" intro/my article points towards.

and STJ is known for being much more of an anglophone than an otaku, certainly as a music fan in early '90s korea japan's influence on him was fundamental but in terms of things he would consciously sample or recreate, that's going to be way more western at this point in his career (but of course there's plenty of subconscious moves being made in "Arayo," like any song).

which reminds me, to whoever asked about STJ's acknowledged influences of the time, I think he kept a lot of that stuff close to the vest (hence the "suitcase merchant" plagiarism criticisms), but one thing I could find in a book (John Lie's) was: "Seo Taiji himself listened widely to the anglophone popular music of the 1980s and 1990s, ranging from the Clash and Sonic Youth to The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against the Machine." considering by the release of STJ's debut SY's geffen push was only just beginning (Goo, Dirty wasn't out yet), this would seem to indicate that he went for at least some of the more seminal underground stuff of the era, though who knows how far or deep he really went. (re: influences broadly, back on the mainstream side there's also Run-D.M.C. which was huge for him.)

Sweet thanks for the thorough reply. Again, don't mean to come off super harsh or anything so sorry if I do. My main point was just that I can't really see a lot of the stuff that's going on with "Nan Arayo" in Korean music up until contemporary K-pop (i.e. last half decade or so). Not talking about anything else; Seo Taiji was of course influential in pretty much every other way you mentioned in the k-pendium post for sure. I've heard all the SES albums recently and I honestly can't think of anything aside from "Shy Boy" that is near the same level of Nan Arayo's framework. Can you point to some specific examples? Everything from Love onwards is pretty straightforward r&b for the time (not a bad thing), the first two have their odd moments but don't seem to be representative of what "Nan Arayo" did. Are you referring to things like the rap breakdown in "Kiss"? H.O.T is generally a good example but here's sort of my take on things:

1. the stuff you say that makes Korean art definitively Korean (e.g. the structure and genre-hopping of Secretly Greatly, Snowpiercer, Ice Cream Cake, Ah Yeah, et al) is something I don't deny (and obviously there's other stuff too that makes something feel korean), but I don't think those things defined Korean art until recently. Yes these sort of things aren't necessarily "the only thing going" or "at any given time the main thing" but that seems true for almost all of the time throughout the 90s. When I think of 90s K-pop I think of the cheesy eurodance stuff, hip hop, and r&b. Obviously there's a certain Korean tinge to K-pop that makes it slightly different (mostly with the hip hop stuff from what I can tell) but that wasn't really related to genre-hopping.

2. even though "Nan Arayo" was the first song to do it, to say it is a total fountainhead from which all other art derives influence from seems a bit optimistic? It sounds like you're positing that Nan Arayo single-handedly formed the Korean national identity and that's why we see genre-hopping in recent films.

Here are two examples, one with film and one with music, that I think point to why what you're saying sounds like overreaching to me:

1. In the 21st century, there have been a growing number of non-fiction films that are being framed/handled as one would a fiction. It's a pretty modern idea and one that is common (or at least not uncommon) and you see that in The Act of Killing, Actress, and Pedro Costa's films. If we were to go along with your line of thinking, that's the equivalent of saying that all of this sprung from Werner Herzog, who is surely one of the first and most popular directors to do this. What I think would be more agreeable is if we simply stated that Herzog was just an initial innovator and a good example of one who utilized this technique.

2. In the past half decade or so, there have been a large number of noisy dance music producers coming out. Some very recent examples include Pete Swanson, Cut Hands, Emptyset, Kerridge, Container, Shapednoise, et al. Does that mean they're all influenced by Merzbeat? Merzbow is definitely the most popular noise musician and Merzbeat is generally a well-known album from his discography because it's unique but it's not like that means all these producers today are influenced by it. Yea he may have been the first to do it but that doesn't mean that you can directly link him to every other producer now. As a note, I know Kazumoto Endo's While You Were Out exists but that's sample-based and a bit too different, and plus Merzbow is obviously the more popular dude in the scene.

Honestly I'm not really gonna touch on the film stuff because that seems like a dead end but I will agree that the domestic popularity of Secretly Greatly points towards its elements being definitively Korean. There aren't other films I know of that are similar and had mainstream success but there are definitely films that are just as genre-hopping. I mentioned it earlier but Leos Carax's Holy Motors is the film of the decade that any film buff would point to if you wanted something genre-hopping. I asked about the Seo Taiji influences by the way so thanks for sharing those.

Also, I'd love for everyone to post other early K-pop songs that are similar to Nan Arayo. I obviously have some blind spots and would love to hear more of that (especially of stuff outside of SM). But even if there happens to be a boatload of songs that are like this, I still feel like it'd be more important to frame Nan Arayo less as an ultimate fountainhead and more as part of a developing milieu for Korea during a time when they could reaaaaally develop their own pop culture after all the foreign occupation, civil war, and military dictatorship.

I think Korean cinema went the genre hopping route in the 90s. If anything I've been missing it in the last few years' output, but k-drama sometimes (or quite often) delivers on it.

I remember this being a pretty good book on the subject, although I read it when it was released and it might seem dated now http://www.amazon.com/South-Korean-Film-Renaissance-Provocateurs/dp/0819569402/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1435051181&sr=1-1&keywords=korean+film

OK I take it back, that AOA song is gr8.

― hurricane weather (forapper), Sunday, June 21, 2015 8:58 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

yay! i feel it's so overstuffed as to overcome all of its faults

Lazy, shitty, racist (and long) article on how kpop artists are plastic monsters without any agency.. I thought we were done with these

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/culture/music/214523-k-pop-big-bang-girls-generation-crayon-super-junior

Oh and of course the plastic surgery is done "to westernize their faces". She managed to tick all the boxes.

that's awful

allusions to communism/autocratic government also nagl

Can you cite any examples abcfsk? My knowledge of 90s Korean films basically boils down to the critically acclaimed/those that did extremely well in the box office. You have auteurs like Im Kwon-taek, Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, Hong Sang-soo, and Lee Chang-dong. And then there's stuff like Marriage Story, Nowhere to Hide, Christmas in August etc. The Korean new wave (late 80s to the mid 90s) was political in nature and you see people who tried to push the boundaries of censorship, this is most easily seen from Jang Sun-woo's films: The Road to the Racetrack and Lies both feature nameless characters who are in abusive/unhealthy relationships (the latter focuses on a relationship between an adult man and a teenager and features explicit s&m); Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie is basically Korea's Kids except more raw; A Petal is about how people were traumatized by the Gwangju Uprising (which features sexual and physical abuse). Before this time, Korean films could be sexual but couldn't be politically conscious so it makes sense that these films used sex as a critique of society. Chilsu and Mansu, which is one of the most significant movies of the time, critiques capitalism. And the people I listed are generally all directors who were trying to work within the confines of the established film industry, there were more radical things happening in the underground too from what I've read (though tbh I don't know much about that). As far as I can tell, a lot of these early/mid 90s films were pretty straightforward... the General's Son and Two Cops movies... nothing really going on there as far as genre-hopping. I'm thinking about the films that came shortly after... Take Care of my Cat, Shiri, Friend, JSA, Peppermint Candy and the same thing could essentially be said of those. I mean, they're all still very much Korean though e.g. Han is very much a real thing/idea/feeling that still permeates Korean art and can be seen expressed in an extreme way in Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy.

oh geez there's a whole little section with plastic surgery facts smh

When Lee, the CEO of S.M. Entertainment, gave a talk at Harvard in 2010, he repudiated Van Gogh’s legacy of troubled innovation, telling students, “you don’t have to cut your ears to come up with masterpieces now.” No: you just have to have them surgically altered by a reputable plastic surgeon.

haha wow i hate whoever wrote this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVwAVbKYYeM

This is how Korea came to foster a creative industry founded on a practiced aversion to creativity. The “inspiration” and “individualism” that are the hallmarks of Western creativity mythologies are anathema to an entertainment industry that leaves nothing to chance.

lol to write this when literally every major box office movie released in the last couple of years has been a sequel or a reboot etc. of an established franchise

Wow BTS is not even pretending to not be a straight-up pop group rn.

These guys need some time off to find inspiration for their art... of course there's nothing wrong with being a pop group, but the song feels tired, there's a lack of freshness, I can imagine (though I could be projecting) the artist-types in BTS feeling some inner conflict about this.

The ear line doesn't seem so bad to me - it could just be a dig at SM - but there's no excusing generalizations like:

[blockquote] The Korean public treats the darlings of K-pop with a reverence bordering on piety, so there’s nothing surprising about the quasi-religious purity of their personas. [/blockquote]

Not even idol fans - we're talking about the whole Korean public here >__>

MAMAOOD is a jam, I think. The new Sistar's a dud. I feel like someone could do whatever it is they're doing equally as well. "Alone" is still an all time jam IMO.

@misterjoshua no apologies, this is a good healthy discussion. i'm querying some k-film experts to help assemble some evidence in one direction or the other.

don't wanna get toooo deep down this rabbit hole, but SES: "wish" is weird in general but the almost harmolodic rap verse through the four-bar classical (into reversed choral harmony sample??) is bizarre; "twilight zone" also quite odd but at 2:40 it goes fucking NUTS, seriously listen to that shit!!; the demon elf production of the rap verse in "dream comes true"; and then like you said, "shy boy," not their craziest but definitely a jaw dropper. and as you also acknowledged, HOT's got even more of these moments, and these were two of the biggest acts of the decade, masterminded by the biggest corporate behemoth in korean music.

"even though "Nan Arayo" was the first song to do it, to say it is a total fountainhead from which all other art derives influence from seems a bit optimistic? It sounds like you're positing that Nan Arayo single-handedly formed the Korean national identity and that's why we see genre-hopping in recent films." well, as you've already acknowledged i've acknowledged (acknowledge acknowledge), i'm not saying its aesthetic consequences are the only or even main thing going in korean pop culture (so, no, not "a total fountainhead from which all other art derives influence"...at least in terms of genre recombination and odd structure, althoughhhh as far as pop music goes if you want to talk about the very earliest iteration of just about every dance routine k-pop has executed since, that would be "arayo"). obviously i'm not saying it "single-handledly formed the korean national identity," but yeah it did do things like completely revamp the male beauty standards that still rule to this day (and, by extension, altered what the boys wanna see from their girls, too)...so yeah, it sure altered that identity immensely. and these are the insights of (quoted-in-article) korean academics, not mine.

as for your herzog example, i have nowhere near the exposure to this kind of western documentary to comment, but keep in mind that most of the major creative players in k-pop today (and aspiring idols, etc) will swear by seo taiji and the influence of "nan arayo" with almost biblical fervor, so unless the non-herzog directors in your herzog example make similar gestures by his altar, i think it's ipso facto no comparison.

"In the past half decade or so, there have been a large number of noisy dance music producers coming out. Some very recent examples include Pete Swanson, Cut Hands, Emptyset, Kerridge, Container, Shapednoise, et al. Does that mean they're all influenced by Merzbeat? Merzbow is definitely the most popular noise musician and Merzbeat is generally a well-known album from his discography because it's unique but it's not like that means all these producers today are influenced by it. Yea he may have been the first to do it but that doesn't mean that you can directly link him to every other producer now." i think yeah, actually, you can. unless you can prove there was someone else doing precisely the same thing prior and has the same kind of record collection penetration merzbow does, it doesn't really matter if container knows him, chances are cruclal influences to his project were themselves informed by what merzbow did. i won't personally make that claim myself, because as familiar with (and appreciative of) a lot of that music as i am, i haven't done the necessary research to make any points w/ conviction there. but sometimes yeah, it really is that simple, i.e. with the beatles and all that followed, or michael jackson's influence absolutely pervading every fucking aspect of k-pop forever and ever amen (something i'll expound upon in a later piece).

the new AOA is like a 2011 after school banger and even for that reason alone i'm fond of it, but the record itself has several better tracks. "chocolate" being the best, and the most fully-formed summation of AOA's best ideas to date (literally, even)

WG to come back as 4, i guess this is the first kind of "reunion tour" phenomenon of the modern idol class ('07 forward)