Our friend Nichol was visiting and in the background I was playing the first Seo Taiji and Boys album and Nichol stopped midsentence and asked, "Who are you playing?" Hearing the ricochet electro beats, she said, "This is freestyle!" The mournful vocals entered as if to confirm this, and she added, "This sounds like the barrio ( Read more... )

Question that applies to the past and the present: were there/are there many disco boybands and disco girl groups? Except I'm meaning "boyband" and "girl group" a bit more narrowly than I normally would: I'm thinking of the music dating back to the gospel quartets that went secular and was taken over by teens and doo-wop and then the late '50s/ ( Read more... )

Nine Muses' "Wild" doesn't quite make it as a rousing jumper à la Kara's "Jumping" and Nine Muses' own "Figaro," though it's got the pounding disco beats and producer duo SweeTune's usual menagerie of electrosquawks and buzzes. Reasonably good melody. Ache and passion. What gets it across, actually, are the raps, from two very different voices: ( Read more... )

I must say that the South Korean Singles Chart is kinda sucking at the moment. Good songs by SHINee and Sistar will soon be winding up their runs, and Girl's Day's pleasingly perky "Expectation" could only manage one week in the Top Ten. Meanwhile, the music that's been exciting people here and on Rolling K-pop (Gaeko, GLAM, D-Unit, Ladies' Code, ( Read more... )

What's going on with Rainbow's "concept"? And how do "concepts" work in general in K-pop? Even though performers do sometimes change 'em like costumes, that doesn't necessarily mean those very performers aren't committed in some deeper way to what the concepts mean. Or at least it doesn't mean that they're not committed in the audience's eyes, or ( Read more... )

Here's a slight rewrite of my Pazz & Jop comments. I'd whipped the comments out in three hours right at deadline, and I liked the result: power and emotion maybe because of the rush. But owing to the speed, some ambiguities were left in, and some useful details were left out. So I've tweaked the sentences a little, and expanded a few.

( Budokan )

While searching "Oscar song meanings," I incidentally found this thread where non-Koreans talk about how they discovered K-pop and why they love it ( Read more... )

Over on Tumblr, Trevor posted nice things about me, which I therefore urge you to read. Appropriately enough, the passage of mine he cites as "perfect" is one that I myself find very problematic. Maybe "perfect" can mean, "desperately needs a lot of elaboration" - which is certainly more stimulating than "wraps it up so that we don't have to say ( Read more... )

Kim Wan Sun, from 1987. It's not quite freestyle, but it's pretty close (closer than Madonna ever got, for instance). And it's pretty great. The same piercing passion.

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"리듬속의 그 춤을" is translated most often as "The Dance In The Rhythm." Google Translate gives us "In Rhythm With The Dance," which I like more, whether or not it's accurate ( Read more... )

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Kara's "Step," Brown Eyed Girls' "Sixth Sense," and Jay Park's "Demon" were all reviewed recently on the Jukebox (here, here, and here). The big "Step" issue for Jukeboxers was how crowded the sound was, some liking it, some not. I'm definitely in the liking-it category, think producers SweeTune make it feel effortless, a full-throttle but easy ( Read more... )