Preview of T-ara posts to come
Never got around to answering arbitrary_greay's comment over on the snsd_ffa Gangkiz thread regarding the T-ara concept and high production values. "T-ara concept" is the subject of one of my 500 future T-ara posts that are in the planning stage. But in brief, the T-ara concept can be summarized, "Words that rhyme, words that repeat, raps that fit sing-song, any rapper can sing, oeuvre interspersed with drip-drip ballads that are inexplicably good, Qri???, Jiyeon never emotes, they make it all sound easy." For that last, as far as production values go, their songs are well-produced but have an air of being tossed-off. In sound and song they're casual Tommy Rall as opposed to Miss A's heavily perspired Bob Fosse. So, there's nothing in T-ara's music that signifies "High Production Values" or "Musical Ambition," despite the actual care that actually goes into the music and the arrangements.
Vids are a different matter, starting with "Roly-Poly." They definitely flaunt the money being thrown at them. The "Roly-Poly" vid was a perfect confectioners concoction (manages to run lightly for ten minutes with no actual plot), "Cry Cry" was good boilerplate gangster melodrama, "Lovey-Dovey" was boilerplate rehash overlaid with tedious Godfather 3 type rumination scenes and mood shots, and "Day By Day" is a ridiculous collection of futuristic dystopian tropes that don't add up to a story. Might have been ridiculously great, anyway, but doesn't seem to fit the songs. (The two songs, "Day By Day" and "Don't Leave," have wide-screen spaghetti-western touches but are too piffling and light for the sweep of the video. I mean "piffling and light" as a high compliment here.) In "Roly-Poly," the song was perfect for the vid, and the overdramatic tracks "Cry Cry"/"We Were In Love" were right for the "Cry Cry" video melodrama. "Lovey-Dovey" was a complete mismatch between song and video, the club sequences being extraneous to the story. But overall I like that T-ara is willing to challenge SNSD and 2NE1 on the terrain of high ambition, but like even more that T-ara never shake their air of B-movie poverty-row opportunism. They'll never be the A list, but they'll often create better sound and vision.
Vids are a different matter, starting with "Roly-Poly." They definitely flaunt the money being thrown at them. The "Roly-Poly" vid was a perfect confectioners concoction (manages to run lightly for ten minutes with no actual plot), "Cry Cry" was good boilerplate gangster melodrama, "Lovey-Dovey" was boilerplate rehash overlaid with tedious Godfather 3 type rumination scenes and mood shots, and "Day By Day" is a ridiculous collection of futuristic dystopian tropes that don't add up to a story. Might have been ridiculously great, anyway, but doesn't seem to fit the songs. (The two songs, "Day By Day" and "Don't Leave," have wide-screen spaghetti-western touches but are too piffling and light for the sweep of the video. I mean "piffling and light" as a high compliment here.) In "Roly-Poly," the song was perfect for the vid, and the overdramatic tracks "Cry Cry"/"We Were In Love" were right for the "Cry Cry" video melodrama. "Lovey-Dovey" was a complete mismatch between song and video, the club sequences being extraneous to the story. But overall I like that T-ara is willing to challenge SNSD and 2NE1 on the terrain of high ambition, but like even more that T-ara never shake their air of B-movie poverty-row opportunism. They'll never be the A list, but they'll often create better sound and vision.
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