The Tracks Of My Tiers

[koganbot]

Made a YouTube playlist of my favorite tracks from K-pop's lower commercial tiers.

Click to view

In ascending order. As you can see, I like both it and that:

Leader'S "Hope" (2011). The song is called "Hope" but the sound is heartache 24/7. I left NYC several years before Hot 97 or whatever it was came in with a Latin freestyle format, but I can imagine this

Comments

[davidfrazer]

Young Melanie wants it all, with a massive voice of promise and pain.
I spotted this a while ago on Unpopular K-Pop Opinions but forget to mention it.





There are some more opinions on Chocolat. I wonder if they were all submitted by the same person.

[koganbot]

I wonder how Melanie got the Korean surname "이" (transliterated as "Lee"*), given that her dad is not of Korean descent. Yes, "Lee" can be an Anglo-American surname, too, e.g., Robert E. Lee, but this is too much of a coincidence, especially since her dad's background is German and Italian. Might her parents be divorced, and she's taken on her Mom's surname? Might it be a stage name, to help her go over in Korea? But her stage name is simply "Melanie." And Tia (the only person I know of in K-pop with a Hispanic surname) is willing to go with "Cuevas," and Juliane with "Alfieri." Wikip:

Through her mother's side, [Melanie] is half Korean, and through her father's side, who was in the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea, she is of Italian and German descent.
*I'd also be curious to know the history of this common transliteration of the common Korean surname "이," since there's no "L" in "이"; should simply be "I" (pronounced "ee") or maybe "Yi" (still pronounced "Ee," I assume), which is how Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer do it, respectively. I can make guesses (none of which are complimentary to non-Asian Americans or non-Asian Brits), but I don't know.

[davidfrazer]

"German and Italian" might just mean that one great-grandparent was German, another was Italian and as for the rest who knows. Anyway, it sounds more interesting than white American with no particular ethnic affiliation. What's more, Juliane and Tia also supposedly have German ancestry, which is also a strange coincidence. Tia said that her cousin was in a rock band in Germany, the name of which I've forgotten.

Here's another Melanie mystery: her Instagram username is melmarielee.

mel

[ext_2019246]

Melanie has a strenght in her voice most kpopsters will never achieve, and she is still so young.