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

[askbask]

I'm super impressed with Hyori. Miss Korea, which was a kind of buzz single, debuted at #1 on Gaon with the biggest sales of the year for a female artist. Bad Girl debuts at #1 this week

[askbask]

Oh and I quite like Love&Girls, in fact I think it's their best original JP single. And best video, not a great achievement admittedly. I go back and forth on their singles - the latest years none of them have really held any longevity for me except I Got A Boy, which I truly enjoy hearing everytime it's played in public here.

[koganbot]

Just discovered that the music to Hyori's "Bad Girls" was written by your compatriots Dsign Music, as of course was SNSD's "I Got A Boy," which you also mentioned (as was my favorite ChoColat track, "I Like It," as was SNSD's "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)"). I definitely need to explore Dsign music's output further. Hyori herself wrote the lyrics to "Bad Girls" (and to the majority of tracks on Monochrome).

My fave "Show Show Show" turns out to be a rewrite and rearrangement of (and vast improvement on) Monrose's "No No No," with Hyori penning new lyrics:

Music is by Belgians Raph Schillebeeckx and Sanne Putseys (a.k.a. Selah Sue).

[koganbot]

Most of the album's music seems to be by people with European surnames, though Hyori herself wrote "Miss Korea."

Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain]

Really liking this album. Immediately clicked with the sillier opening tracks ("Holly Jolly Bus" is like something stuck into a deep cut on an Archies record!) -- and immediately pegged track two ("Miss Korea") as ironic, though the social commentary I'm imagining in the delivery seems more interesting than the translated lyrics. I do like "I don’t want to hang on and cry over something so little / Like a springtime illusion that’ll disappear after I wake up

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain]

Seem to have glossed past you saying that Hyori wrote "Miss Korea." My first thought on that one was "Aimee Mann."

Re: Lee Hyori

[koganbot]

My research probably isn't a whole lot better than yours (I'll see if I can get Mat and Sabina to fill you in better). I'd say that the mid to late '90s is when K-pop was becoming routinized as a business, the agency system coming to dominate through SM Entertainment, though that wasn't Fin.K.L's label. The music was and still is pretty restless, however. The teenpop comparison is only half-apt, in that there wasn't some other regular pop that K-pop was breaking off of. K-pop was the basic pop, though its audience included a lot of teens and probably pre-teens too. But the big group H.O.T. were getting videos banned and were engaging in controversial subject matter (and throwing thrash rock into their pop-r&b-hip-hop mix) while still being massive teenybopper faves.

I don't know much Fin.K.L. (and have been meh on the little I've heard), but the first Hyori solo singles a decade ago seemed kinda Jam & Lewis, forceful r&b/pop, Hyori a sexual presence walking/prancing through various 'hoods. And for Korea I think the sexiness, normal

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

I became a problem child

[koganbot]

Lee Hyori about her stardom and her self-esteem issues:

http://www.allkpop.com/article/2013/06/lee-hyori-tears-up-as-she-talks-about-the-hardships-she-faced-during-her-career

"I want to tell everyone, 'You're perfectly fine right now'. No one told me that."

(h/t Mat)