Don't know if any of you-uns know WJSN Chocome, who are, like, a sub-unit of a subgroup of WJSN, but they're going all "Shanghai Romance"-"Bangkok City"-era Orange Caramel on their new single.*

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And as David Frazer points out to me, their 2020 single, "Hmph!," is part of the Austral-Romanian Empire.** Definitely belong to the No Speak Americano ( Read more... )

My flow cuts the sky
Like I'm a Khalo Frida
I'm the push behind the swing
No one needs to understand

I'm going to eat like crushed bridges
I'ma bite your feelings out

Smells in the air
but I'm feelin so alone
Roof was on fire,
You never let me know

I'm Going To Eat Like Crushed Bridges is my new Eardrums playlist. It's up on my YouTube channel. Here's the ( Read more... )

Was going to use the title "Trap Hegemony And The Italotrot Question" because I knew it would make Chuck Eddy smile; but I decided "Where 'Galaxy,' naturally enough, means 'Italo'"* was funnier, though maybe David Frazer will be the only one to smile. David's the person who came up with the genre title "Italotrot" to describe Hong Jinyoung's "Love ( Read more... )

2018 my favorite idol-like tracks were not K-pop but Q-pop from Kazakhstan: Ninety One "Ah!Yah!Ma!" KeshYou & Baller "Swala La La," Crystals "Неге мен?" Off-year for K-pop or just my hearing of it? /1 @MargaretMayHan
- Frank Kogan (@koganbot) January 21, 2019

Best K-pop track TheEastLight. "Don't Stop" will forever have asterisk due to bandmembers ( Read more... )

Remember five years ago we were talking about Japanese freestyle?
( Read more... )

I like how the rhythm in "Tiny Montgomery" makes itself strong by just digging in and digging further, no moving forward. -The rhythm I'm referring to is mostly Dylan's voice, and the strum strum strum. Bass and the rest are a shuffling swing, I guess. So you can sway back and forth while the song steadily drives you down. A-Plus ( Read more... )

Distracted, scattershot listening, with some good discoveries nonetheless. Pretty much totally ignored hip-hop, but it kept pushing its way onto this list anyway, either as guest spots or per se. A couple of non-gender-reversible videos by Tahiti and A.Kor. A lot of hard-rocking aggression in my top ten (top twelve if you go down to Future), the ( Read more... )

Reposting this from Tumblr, where Tom Ewing links a piece at NPR by Amy Kamenetz. Here are Tom's comments (though I'm not sure whom he's quoting at the start) and underneath them my own speculation:

If kids report that they’re transgender and have one leg and belong to a gang and have several children … take it with a grain of salt.
This is a good ( Read more... )

As you may have surmised, foreign agents shut off the transponder on my home DSL. Search parties expect to find said DSL sometime midweek. In the meantime I've been walking around my new neighborhood. I'm now living in heavily Latino west Denver, though my apt is just a couple minutes' walk from the Little Saigon business strip on Federal. The ( Read more... )

Song of the week is Lim Chang Jung's "Open The Door," a seemingly square, florid, impassioned trot that goes hilariously LMFAO in the chorus. The song's actual history runs opposite: was originally, last year, a forgettable would-be int'l-style dance track that I'd heard but forgotten by the Wonder Boyz (incl. LMFAO squiggles but w/out the zest we ( Read more... )