E.via (artist of the year, 2010)
For the many people* who ask me "Why Korea?" my answer is love. Yes, and there are plenty of other answers too, one being that people who know more than I do come to my lj and talk to me about K-pop, providing sociability and mindwork, and another being that K-pop is creating a hip-hop, r&b, dance-pop amalgam far better than the Billboard Hot 100's, and so on and so forth. But there's always got to be love. With rock there was Jagger**, with glitter the Dolls, with punk the Stooges, with disco Donna, with hip-hop Spoonie Gee, with freestyle Debbie Deb (both the real Debbie Deb and the imposter), with hair-metal Axl, with teenpop Ashlee, etc.***
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
E.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
Click to viewE.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.