K-pop (2015)

yeahhhh it's flop city. FTisland releasing the korean pop rock equivalent of "who let the dogs out" in 2015: http://k2nblog.com/single-ftisland-puppy/

also man what were they thinking...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDevPHBHNG0

Is that a promo song? LMAO.

Mino gains more from coming in second, the winner in these shows is usually pre-determined/whoever has the best narrative arc.

Since we're talking about the most loved stars, that's what tvn surveyed people on this week

01. Yoo Jae-suk (MC)
02. Jun Ji-hyun (actress)
03. Kim Soo-hyun (actor)
04. Song Hye Kyo (actress)
05. Jang Dong-gun (actor)
06. Lee Young-ae (actress)
07. G-Dragon (singer)
08. Kim Tae-hee (actress)
09. Ha Jung-woo (actor)
10. Choi Ji Woo (actress)

11. Ha Ji-won (actress)
12. Hwang Jung-min (Actor)
13. Kim Hye-soo (actress)
14. SNSD / Girl Generation (singers)
15. PSY (singer)
16. IU (singer)
17. Suzy (singer/actress)
18. Yoo Ah-in (Actor)
19. Shin Dong-yup (comedian)
20. Park Bo-young (actress)

21. Seo Taiji (singer)
22. Jeon Do-yeon (actress)
23. Kim Hee-ae (actress)
24. Hyun Bin (actor)
25. Cho Yong-pil (singer)
26. Lee Hyori (singer)
27. Cha Seung-won (actor)
28. Kang Ho-dong (MC)
29. Lee Kyung-kyu (actor/MC)
30. Lee Jung-jae (actor)

I like Taeyang's part on "Fear" but not Mino's, though the lyrics aren't bad. Unpretty Rapstar season 2 looks like it's gonna be so bad BTW... nearly all the contestants have that UR "style" you talked about upthread (though KittiB is in it).

About IU, this duet is kinda taking her career full circle, isn't it? She got her start catering to older male fans.

No dig on her, I also like "Leon"

Catering to and working with ahjussis is a tad different though. Melon has a neat feature which lets you see who listens to the top tracks and for Leon that's 52,7% female listeners.

Ok I just now made the connection that Basic was in Jiggy Fellaz with LE back in the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCcoQw3hbFs

Interesting list of top Kpop prechoruses: https://youtu.be/ynB88wbob-w

maybe a 5% overlap w/ what my picks would be, but gotta love how many of em sound like full-fledged choruses

yes, this list is missing about 4-5 BEAST songs :p

'good luck' at the v least

And YeY... Midnight... Fiction...

songs whose prechoruses are much better than their actual choruses: Nine Muses - Hurt Locker, BTOB - Wow, 100% - Bad boy, Big Star - Hot Boy

???

Bang Bang Bang?

LMAO, accurate

I like the snappy little kick drum on this Woolim (of Playback) ft. Eric Nam song: https://youtu.be/xzlMsvF73tE

yessss agree 100 about hurt locker

oh and true, forgot for a second that pre-chorus of bang3 is def the best part

speaking of "hurt locker," new fun live band version that's much more successful than i would have guessed. really brings out the "get lucky" reference in the chorus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpYkIeVQGqw&feature=youtu.be

also that crowd did an admirable job but you gotta get like six times the bodies out there to make that kinda thing look hype ㅠ

I remember we once discussed western songs with k-pop attributes and that dire new macklemore definitely qualifies. said in the NJ thread:

wow. the shifts in genre and tone from section to section are like shitty k-pop (and the amount of time it takes to get to the chorus is absurd even by those standards). can't imagine why anyone involved thought it would work in the western market in 2015...

that nine muses live is great! i came here to post it, lol.

the small number of people in the audience is baffling... i kinda suspect they're all staff :p

fuckin FEELING these red velvet teasers y'all

shades of Pippi in their styling, which by the way still I don't understand how they have been able to promote all this time without major heat from the astrid lindgren estate. at least red velvet are smart enough to go generic.

Some relaxing 90s RnB style vocal harmonization for yer labor day weekend:

https://youtu.be/B_s81YkMlUU

^^ not current but I just found this... it's a pre-debut original(?) song by Seventeen, easily missed as it was only promoted on their ytube channel & website.

https://youtu.be/aLvNgZvIV4Q

^^ I don't think we talked about Amazing Baby in this thread yet... it's not clear that they have idol personalities but this is a solid throwback song.

Giriboy's title track for Monsta X is a hot mess, but the album track that follows it is pretty good:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGdbaEDVWp0

really solid. the 'baby baby baby baby baby' bit sounds just like ariana grande. video is incredible.

nearly every single aspect of this is incredible

uhhhhh this album...might...be better than pink tape??

my initial impression is that it is, oh my god

i feel so confused ;_; but good ;_;

i think the argument against is that pink tape's best songs are probably just a little bit more distinct and compelling, and that album has such a clear and well-balanced color palette...but it also loses a lot of momentum fast in the last two or three songs, and it's hard to say an album is great when it fizzles. the red, meanwhile, is all killer, and with a consistency that's a nice change of pace in k-pop (even through some very dramatic stylistic shifts). but i need to give it more time to settle.

a crazy nice surprise, in any event

For how good the silly rap parts have been in previous RV singles they're oddly awkward here. But the rest of the song is really great, and it's their best MV yet obviously.

Crazy how good SM is at creating unique-sounding, uniquely k-pop, coherent albums when the group has a real musical identity to work with. That's when their obsessive SM ways really pay off - you feel their talented creative team is really aiming for something original and their special collab culture getting them there. When they lack that identity, that blueprint to work with... we get the SNSD albums.

For how good the silly rap parts have been in previous RV singles they're oddly awkward here

well they do have to fit multiple mj singles into the meter

meanwhile count me in among the O_O reactions to this single/video

@abcsfk bigtime co-sign on both of those

also just by being here a little bit i've gotten some insights into what those "obsessive ways" and "special collab culture" are like, and it really goes so much deeper and more beautifully than i could've imagined. i hope there's some way for me to help get some of that intel out there more because what's happening at this company is basically the innovation of a new kind of 'auteur' in music and the fact that they've arrived at that (and continue to refine it) so deliberately is one for the history books (and, like you said, it's uniquely k-pop – uniquely korean, even).

and brad your thread about daniel johns' new album is what got me into that, +1 to you (or anyone!) if you can find the one little snatch of vocal melody on the red that makes it sound like someone at SM likes one of the earlier tracks on that album (prob coincidence though knowing who wrote the song maaaaybe not...i will find out)

What's Red Velvet's unique identity? That they're a blank slate for tasteful eccentricity?

This is great BTW

their sound is definitely more r&b-focused than any SM group before them, probably largely because (especially for such a "small" unit) with SM's method of specialization most of the times there'd only be one powerhouse vocalist, whereas RV have three.

in terms of a more lyrical/imagistic "identity," SNSD were designed to be the model citizen/woman/wife (at least in terms of asian patriarchy of the past decade...), f(x) answered that by being smart and sassy aesthetes, and as SM said, RV are meant to split the difference between those two.that ties into their musical concept with being both red (fierce barnburners) and velvet (smooth janets). i thought that would be a middling disaster but this album actually delivers on the concept and proves its versatility. granted, SM plays with these boundary lines at times, but usually they're pretty consistent (i.e., even when SNSD gets weird with "i got a boy" it's about valorizing 'nice guys' and talking about how they want to look good for them; it's really only now that they're all aging out of their idol years anyway that they're allowed to sing a song like "you think;" meanwhile, when they were young, even f(x) did stuff like "chu" alongside brattier proclamations like "nu ABO"). i think RV will probably get more Red over the next few years then enter their autumn (i.e. where SNSD's been for the past year or two) by getting progressively more Velvet, and that their lyrics for at least the Red vibe will be more f(x)-style than, say, "dumb dumb" or "ice cream cake," which are much more submissive/SNSD than the arrangements would suggest.

granted, i don't mean to answer for abcfsk, i'm curious what he/she has to say about it

I think SNSD have been locked to the kpopian trend of concepts and never really got a permanent character, not even a waifu-esque one - and so they could be completely dumb and passive one single (Oh!) and fierce the next (Run Devil Run) and then all over the place the last few years. Their debut single more than anything signalled a serious performance group with hard synchronized dancing, and then they got really sickly cute for a couple of follow-ups.

Anyway, I think f(x) has a sort of punk kidz aesthetic, rebelling youth, standing up to societal conventions, kicking waste bins, sticking your tongue out at adults, finding support in your tough 'unnie' instead. Red Velvet is a brighter mash up of pop culture colors, a rush of surface emotions. Musically I think that's been a part of them from the start, even as people thought they were aping f(x) early on. Ok so we have to work a bit harder to make 'Automatic' fit in, but I guess they also need their down time. Both f(x) and Red Velvet have their own signature vocal styling, but where f(x) get that bratty schoolyard rhyme thing going Red Velvet play with cheerleader chants.

i think SNSD have some superficially "fierce" stuff, but even "run devil run" is about being cheated on and still from a subordinate perspective (this is her telling him off after catching him and trying to reason him out of this "habit" multiple times; also, "i'll get my revenge when i become a great person someday," i.e. even in this moment the notion of payback is aspirational and deferred). and stuff like "the boys" seems like girl power encouragement a la f(x)'s standards only until you notice that all this chest-puffing is just to get the boys' attention. even when they were "a serious performance group w/ hard synchronized dancing" (not like that indicates anything either way), they were announcing themselves with and named after a song wherein a "selfish grabber"/older man corners her and brings her into virginal hysterics with a sudden kiss.

plus this "ideal wife" thing isn't an inference, that's been the marketing gameplan for them from day one (and also of all the girl groups whose clear debt to them is mentioned by the public at their every turn: girlfriend, lovelyz, now april too, apink though maybe they've been doing it for so long it's started to seem like their own...)

I vaguely remember someone connected to SNSD saying something along those lines, but I don't see any documents spelling that out for each of those groups. Admittedly naming your group "Girlfriend" gives away some of the thinking. Anyway even if they did set out to be the ideal image of a wife for men they haven't sold that image consistently. Thinking back on their aesthetics through the 8 years it hasn't defined their overall image: a jumbled mix of various hats for various occasions. Even when they sold that ideal through songs like Kissing Yous and Oh!s they never came off that way in their promotional activities, which I think is an important thing to consider. I grew interested in kpop partially by watching SNSD variety and they were always loud, comfortably themselves, fun, rambunctious. Then there's the Japanese campaign which has almost exclusively sold them as mature, model-like ideals for women. So if the strategy was to sell them as demure kittens they weren't very good at executing it and I think very few kpop observers would identify them as such when asked 'what kind of group is SNSD?'. If there's anything to connect the dots of their career I think it's the comfort and likeability with which they've been 'Korea's top group', regardless of musical output, never seeming particularly tested until the Jessica thing.

(SNSD debuted with Into the New world, not 'SNSD'. Re: RDR consider lines like "When I cared for you I warned you to act nice" - implying she's set the rules, he broke them, good riddance since half the world is men. That serves as the conclusion to the song.)

i'm saying that even through those various hats and occasions, that message has been surprisingly consistent throughout. i don't think "ideal woman/dream girl" precludes them from being fun or comfortable with themselves, or any of the other things you're saying (then again, you mentioned the "hard synchronized dancing" of k-pop as a counterpoint, whereas i would say that implies to the viewer the very kind of obedience and self-sacrifice central to this type of image – see girlfriend getting all these props in the media and in fact taking the song higher on the charts than it was upon release for their willingness to hurt themselves so much for the act). it's true that a group like apink has taken it a step further than SNSD (saying on variety that none of them have ever been kissed so when they sing about kissing they're thinking about their fans, come the fuck on) but that's extreme even by the standards of this concept. as for their image in japan, i still think being modelesque and perfect is actually an example of this strategy, not anything contrary to it (to be clear, the desired effect isn't that they seem accessible – that would be AKB48 with the whole "endearing inability" thing – but the very opposite: both as role models and objects of fantasies, they represent an ideal by the very token of being superlative).

have you asked anyone in asia that question about what type of group SNSD is? b/c i'm basing this off a broad spread of things, and the role model/ideal wife appeal is almost always one of the first things i've heard in exactly those types of conversations. it was actually the first time it occurred to me at all, tbh (coming from a place where i need to google translations if i wanna understand the lyrics, and where the asian social mores in response to which these personae are designed aren't intuitive/engrained in the way it is for their intended audience; with a song and video as fierce as IGAB, i would've never imagined they're singing about how showing their boyfriends their bare face is unthinkable).

It's certainly an interesting question with a song like IGAB, it's hard to read one way or the other. Even as someone who speaks Korean and also checks out lyric translations the content didn't really register before someone else brought it up. And the lyrics are dumb, but are they what people take away from the release? What I remember from Korean fans instant reactions (purely anecdotally, reading news story comments and fan board discussion) is "coool" "hip hop power" etc. People will probably remember the super sing-along chorus (i got a boy - !MEOTJIN!) but do they consider the whole thing to send a certain message? I don't know, but I don't think we can look at the lyrics in isolation either. And the tone of the lyrics is deeply silly to the point of being one big joke, even if I won't defend communicating those stale attitudes even in this fashion. It is worth discussing though, since as you mention The Boys had a similar weird juxtaposition going.

What I remember people saying about SNSD in Korea is mostly "pretty". I've had some deeper discussions about kpop with Koreans and other Asians while living there but not so much about SNSD specifically. They are, or were at least, seemingly known for long legs and the personalities of the various members.