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.

[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,

[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.

[azacab]

D-unit's beat is entirely jacked (except for the autotune chorus bit) from the Almighty R.S.O's "One In The Chamba" and it makes me really mad(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZq5IdtpMN8).

[koganbot]

This is really interesting, though actually the beat is a bit different ("One In The Chamba" has more beats, and more of a roll); 'tis the chord and the way it washes that's copied. I'm not as mad about this as you are, since I don't know if (1) Zico or whoever (I believe he produced but didn't write "Stay Alive") didn't pay for it, or (2) there wasn't some other source that "One In The Chamba" itself lifts from. And even if neither is the case, this is kinda what hip-hop and dancehall do, lifting whatever they can. Hip-hop originated from DJs lifting and manipulating breakbeats. Anyway, I actually prefer the D-Unit track.

I don't mean to be cavalier. Someone should probably pay someone else some money. But sometimes such concerns don't come into play until something's a hit, and "Stay Alive" never hit.

Reading the "One In The Chamba" thread, I see that there's a Wiz Khalifa track that used it on a mixtape. And mixtapes being mixtapes...

[koganbot]

In fact, it might be "Ink My Whole Body" that the D-Unit people were listening to.

[azacab]

Oh, I'm not really mad - I wrote that really quickly before leaving my apartment so it definitely didn't translate my sarcasm very well