Hyori & Girls

[koganbot]

Lee Hyori: Lee Hyori's Monochrome is the opposite of monochrome, with Hyori applying her gently authoritative style to all sorts of the last century's dance music (incl. country pop and western swing!). Strangely, I'm not hit with a lot of feeling - until the last four songs. That's only on one listen. Maybe the album simply takes a number of

Comments

Re: Lee Hyori

[koganbot]

"sexiness... was something of a breakthrough"

Which isn't to say that Seo Taiji & Boys, H.O.T., S.E.S., etc. weren't massively sexy, just that Hyori was making a point of showing a lot of skin and I guess was having more of a come-on (though my knowledge of the videos that preceded hers is so limited that I might be all wrong about Hyori being a breakthrough here; just going on what I've read, and all the commenters on YouTube etc. who accuse HyunA of copying Hyori by being all sexual, which is typically dumb commentary, but does tell me that Hyori is considered some kind of template/progenitor).

As for the teenpop thing: I don't think of the K-pop idol groups as being specifically teenpop any more than Thriller or Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" were specifically teenpop (they sold to the general pop audience, not just to the lil uns). But of course Michael Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe were sources for a lot of the Euro-American teenpop starting in the mid '90s through the early '00s (when in the USA the teenrock confessional began competing with that sort of teenpop for teen attention). And of course, Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe are big sources for the K-pop idol groups, too. But that doesn't make the idol groups specifically teenpop. Just pop.

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain]

Contrary to the last however many years, when I used teenpop above I really meant something more like "A-pop" -- the TRL/adult contempo/teenpop confluence. At that time, there was teenybopper-only stuff on Radio Disney, but there was plenty of teenybopper-plus-general-audience stuff, too. ("I Want It That Way," IIRC, was as much an adult contemporary masterpiece as a Backstreet Boys hit -- Max Martin won a bunch of legit songwriting awards for it, and that's to say nothing of strands of country, R&B, rap, novelty music etc. etc. that were intersecting.)

And maybe Michael Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe inhabit a similar territory. In fact, the nich-i-ification of teenpop away from "A-pop" is probably a relatively recent phenomenon. My understanding of teenybopper music from most eras, from Paul Anka through the Backstreet Boys (say) is that it has an uneven and intersecting relationship with the rest of the pop landscape. Maybe the niche-ing of teenpop is heading back via performers like Taylor Swift, but I still see it as more of a niche interest in the U.S. than in (say) Korea. (Or maybe I'm way off here.)

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain]

By "heading back" I mean "moving back toward a shared pop space" via Swift. But I'm not sure about that.