koganbot | Some videos, 2009

Current Music: Untouchable ft. Hwa Young "Tell Me Why"

Entry tags:

Some videos, 2009

I had an ongoing list of videos I liked, then back in May I forgot to keep up with it, so here are some vids from early '09. For further viewing pleasure visit Kat's tumblr.

Will Young "Let It Go": Superhero in his mind, life doesn't cooperate, he tries to adapt. The song hadn't hit me on the album: the chord changes seemed to acquiesce too easily, turned this into a "nice" song while the voice was trying to do something sadder. The video delivers what the music alone couldn't. Will is precisely accurate as the would-be boisterous drunk, flashes of jollity and rage, ultimate defeat, while the bouncers are giving him the old heave-ho.

Watch on YouTube

Untouchable ft. Hwa Young "Tell Me Why":

petronia wrote, "What I'm getting is that the 'interrogation scene' takes place in the head of the male protagonist. His fiancée rejected him, fell into an obvious deep depression and attempted/committed suicide in such a way as to make it seem the relationship was the problem (tearing up photos, etc.), except the guy was basically blindsided - so the rest of the vid is a reification of his warring emotions of anger and confusion (TELL ME WHY YOU DID THIS TO ME) and helplessness at not being able to save the Korean Sylvia Plath from herself (stuck on the balcony watching the proceedings). Why he had to call in a pop group to aid him in the effort I don't know though - presumably Untouchable speak to his emotions during this difficult period in his life?"

Watch on YouTube

The Lonely Island ft. T-Pain "I'm On A Boat"

Watch on YouTube

Enrique Iglesias ft. Ciara "Takin' Back My Love": Modernist design elements become subject and object of "action painting" approach to rearranging apartment.

Watch on YouTube

Nikki Awesome "You Say (It Was Supposed To Be)"

Watch on YouTube

Timberlee f. Tosh "Heels"

Watch on YouTube

Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero"

Watch on YouTube

Britney Spears "If You Seek Amy"

Watch on YouTube

Taylor Swift "White Horse"

Watch on YouTube

Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me"

Watch on YouTube

And here's a recent one, "Caesar" by I Blåme Coco ft. Robyn [EDIT: well, this was taken down, and if there's (another?) copy of the music video I can't find it so here's the track but no mv]:

Watch on YouTube

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yes, the fan club hostilities immediately grabbed my attention. Also the fact of the diaspora input ("diaspora" mostly meaning the U.S., I assume).

I wonder if you could tell me what you think is going on in the melodies. They seem Westernized to me, though I'm not schooled enough in Asian melody to really know what I'd mean by non-Westernized. But despite being Westernized, they don't seem to match with the melodies that actually hit in the U.S. and Britain and Europe, and the difference in melody... whatever it is... is a barrier to my engaging immediately with what I hear of Korean popular music. Of course, I realize that there is a range of melodies, just as there is in U.S. popular music. And I haven't heard enough of the Korean to even know what the range is. (And I wouldn't say I could explain what's going on in the melodies of Euro-American pop, even.)

Don't apologize for digressing, since I don't see where you're diverging from any established topic on this thread. I did post a K-Pop video, after all.

(By the way, is "K-Pop" the right term here? And is there some Korean pop music that's emphatically not K-Pop? I mean, not counting stuff that's emphatically metal and so on, some of which I'd bet is popular if not "pop," going by what happens in other countries.)

Last q first: You've got a few rnb flavored pop musicians as of late. Se7en is one of them, and he's even aiming for the billboard charts with Darkchild and Lil Kim , but his Korean work sounds just as "American". Others adapt the Black Eyed Peas/Flo Rida-ish electrofied rnb/hiphop fusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkwPTz67sgI

More common than particular artists being particularly non-k-pop is particular tracks doing particularly non-k-pop things. Like how SNSD's 'Chocolate Love' will probably sound a lot more identifiable to you than any of their other singles.

[Error: unknown template video]

What I can say about the Korean pop 'sound' is that it threatened to be exceedingly plagued by J-pop bubblegum pop cloning, all familiar chords, but that it in recent years has developed its own flavour. The diaspora mix of genres in K-pop than J-pop might have something to do with it. 2009s biggest song was 'Gee', which sounds distinctly non-American, and yet also distinct on its own (and if I had to attempt to describe its appeal -- it's all in the chewy consonants dotting the verses and exploding in the chorus, less about melody). Korean pop is also getting less and less interested in ballads, and the rhythmical element is indeed often in the foreground, as with Billboard-flirting BoA:

[Error: unknown template video]

A couple of other good recent songs, although the melody may not be what eventually lures you over to their side:

"largest boy band in the world" (-Wikipedia:
[Error: unknown template video]

the eurodance angle
[Error: unknown template video]

Much thanks for this. I'll say more when I get the chance to listen.

Of course it's worth mentioning as an add-on the lack of success for every asian sensation trying to break the NA market. A sort of acid test has been Utada Hikarus attempts -- Utada is the biggest selling artist of all time in Japan, a self-made star -- who's released several English albums with no impact. Working with Stargate, Timbaland, etc. I have a few things to say about the strategy she and others have chosen.. perhaps another time.

Oddly enough, Utada's Exodus made it to my local branch of the public library here in Denver (it's not a particularly Asian section of town); I borrowed it because I'd liked "Kremlin Dusk" a lot when

inhibitorylinks had pushed it back in one of the 2007 League Of Pop heats.

jel_bugle, who was judging it under the blindfold, gave it first place and called it "Female fronted euro goth metal!" and said, "I bet she wears a Basque, gothic cross and purple velvet dress, and that the main guitarist is bald and wears a long black leather coat." It made me think of Madonna in ballad mode choosing to accompany herself with British plinking art-folk (which no doubt is what Russian bureaucrats listen to when they go out with their wives for a romantic evening).

I don't remember much of Exodus, except that nothing else on it reached me, and I was left with the impression that she was being artier than was good for her. A little before then I'd gotten "Flavor Of Life" (which actually came several years after Exodus), which I also like, and which isn't at all arty. Feels rather '80s, a bit like the sort of ballad that would appear as a third single on an Exposé album and outsell any of the actual freestyle tracks. I really should search out more.

(Looking at Wiki I see that Utada had another U.S. album out just last May. I'd not heard of it. I've just now streamed "Come Back To Me," and it makes me shrug. Her voice is strong and deep, and there's a later sectoin where she's singing quick syllables like nu-nonmelisma-Mariah, and it's not bad to listen to but nothing jumps out as having a distinctive personality that's going to make me think I'm hearing a specific person, rather than just a not-bad r&b track.)

Yes, the lead singles from that campaign are totally bland and anonymous and my main objection to her English work is that she's dismissed her best feature outside her voice -- her own production work, which sounds lush and crisp and stands out on any stereo or radio.

I think the most interesting song off that album is "Crying Like A Child" (also in the lineage of "Superstar", that you posted about some time ago... she does write all her own lyrics, and while her style is poetic in Japanese it has this sort of wacky specificity in English that I do think carries personality. She's also diaspora btw).

"Exodus" is her worst album IMO.

Edited 2010-01-04 11:20 (UTC)

Do you know if she came late to Japanese, like Selena with Spanish and Drunken Tiger with Korean, or if Japanese was spoken at home, hence fundamentally native to her?

(My friend Luc Sante, who moved to New Jersey from southeast Belgium when he was ten, wrote a book I like a lot called Factory Of Facts, fundamentally about having English layered on top of his original French, though the situation - and the book - are a lot more complicated than that, given that his part of Belgium had two different, though related, languages (French and Walloon) and Belgium itself is divided by language between Flemish and French and is apparently getting more so. In any event, for a while Luc found himself thinking in English and feeling in French, to put it too simplistically. I think you'd have a lot to say on such subjects. Also, are you familiar with Alex Ostroff, who posts on the Jukebox and on ilX (also has a livejournal that he doesn't use much)? He lives in your city; and among other languages he knows Spanish, and he's been telling us what is going on in "Loba" that's not going on in "She Wolf."

I'm pretty sure she spoke Japanese at home, although I don't remember if she initially started writing songs in English or Japanese (the info is out there, somewhere, but it's been a while).

Thanks for the book rec! I'll check it out. I was in Belgium in 2005 (my uncle's family is based in Antwerp) and in the Flemish regions it's way easier to find someone who speaks English than someone who speaks French. Which would have seemed weird to me if I didn't live in Quebec (Belgium is the only place in the world more hung up on language divides that's not actually engaged in civil war).

I do arithmetic and handle phone numbers in Chinese. But apparently there's a scientific reason for that: the human brain remembers syllables rather than digits, and the Mandarin Chinese 1-100 counting system is both perfectly regular and one syllable per digit, making it easier to do basic mental math.

I know who Alex is from ILM, and I think we've had exactly one exchange on LJ (and I've forgotten what his LJ name is XD;). I sometimes wonder if I've actually met him, though, since we go to a lot of the same shows, and often I'd actually check ILM for his opinion on something I'd missed.

He's

weasel_seeker. Is his ilX name Alex In Montreal? I seem to recall there being some confusion, 'cause there'd been a previous Alex In Montreal, and then nu-Alex accidentally took the name, and I don't know if he stuck with it or not. I'm not sure my memory is correct here, though.

Oh dear, I always assumed it was the same person. Though I personally know at least five Alexes in offline Montreal!

My father is the child of immigrants, but he said they never spoke Russian or Yiddish in the home. Maybe they assumed there was just no going back, psychologically as well as physically. Both his parents had spent time exiled/imprisoned in Siberia (my grandfather escaped from a Czarist prison and made his way to North America by way of Vladivostok); but I don't think they had any thought of returning after the revolution (there must have been a period before it became clear how bad the Communists were going to be; but then, the anti-Semitism was sure to remain; both of my father's parents died when I was a child, before I would have thought to ask them their reasoning). I don't know what the immigrant community was like on the Chicago west side of the '20s and '30s when my dad was growing up, what its attitude was towards language and such (and it's only recently that I realize what a dumbfuck I was for not asking): I don't know if Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian were still vibrant languages there or were just what old people spoke.

Here's a working link for my old Drunken Tiger review (annoyingly, the Village Voice re-did their URLs, destroying old links in the process). Among my many ignorances when writing that review was that I thought all the members of Drunken Tiger had been born in the L.A. area and came late to the Korean language. That may have been true of Roscoe Umali, possibly was true of DJ Shine (Wikip doesn't list a place of birth though gives South Korea as his "origin"), but definitely is not true of Tiger JK, who was born in Seoul, moved with his family to the U.S. at age 12, went back and forth between the two countries making music as a young man, and now seems to work mainly out of South Korea. As

petronia notes above, he's married to the excellent rapper and singer Yoon Mi-rae, a.k.a. T, born in Texas (mother Korean-American, father African-American), whose career began in South Korea when she was a teenager.

I like "Eat You Up," but any good r&b singer could be singing BoA's part. This isn't a criticism of it as music, but the track is not a good way to market her here, pushing a single that doesn't convey the singer as a personality. (Of the tracks

petronia embedded on the Wonder Girls thread, BoA's "Amazing Kiss" was the one that was easiest for me to relate to, nice '90s dance pop with a Latin tinge, it seemed, though I wouldn't know if she comes across as a personality in that one either.)

Yes, that's largely been the criticism against her English album -- it's not very BoA-ish (although BoA has an amazing presence in the Eat You Up video) and the same has basically been my my point about Utada . Why would the American crowd buy straightforward r&b by a foreigner when they can get it from locals? If they are sensations in their home countries and someone sees potential for moneymaking abroad, surely that's on the basis of the material that made them big. Utada straight up said she wanted to make rnb that sounded like what's popular in the US, to break into the market. I admire her honesty -- she's always come off as a straight talker -- but that just reveals a flawed thinking to me.

I haven't followed Wonder Girls attempt much, but #76 for 'Nobody' isn't THAT bad. If SNSD try to do the same I'd heavily suggest simply translating 'Gee' -- based on anecdotal evidence most people who I'd never thought would like it are fascinated and nothing really sounds remotely like it on US radio. With pop making a return to Billboard, it seems like a safer choice than rnb pandering.

I quite agree; I think Utada fundamentally misreads r&b, at least in that statement; no major star in the genre simply makes r&b that sounds like what's popular. The stars make r&b that sounds distinctly like themselves. When you hear a Rihanna or a Beyoncé you know it's Rihanna or Beyoncé the second she opens her mouth. Same in nearby genres from the likes of Britney and Jay-Z and BEP and Katy Perry and Lady GaGa. This isn't to say that music that's generally generic can't be good - I love '80s freestyle and '80s Italodisco, and my favorite two Madonna tracks are "Everybody" and "Justify My Love," neither of which sounds distinctly like Madonna - but being generic doesn't seem to be what works in r&b, either artistically or commercially. Maybe the dance-r&b amalgam on recent hits by Jay Sean and Jason DeRulo and Iyaz will change the game, if those three turn into long-running stars in the U.S. I hate those tracks, by the way, even if I'm swayed by their prettiness. (Jay Sean's already got a history in the U.K., not that I don't find him dull there, too).

This or this is what I wanted Utada to do in English. I'm not sure it would sell, but with Owl City's abhorrent metaphors set to pleasant nothingness reaching #1, well who knows anymore.

I don't know if this has something to do with Utada's own history - she was one of the first Japanese pop stars to make pop with R&B influence (which is what I'd call it rather than just "R&B" as Asian audiences called it at the time), so for quite a few years the Hikki 'brand' was equated with R&B. Particularly in contrast to the trance-pop of her sales rival Hamasaki Ayumi (Avex tunes as as recognizable as Xenomania's, and are very East Asian-sounding, with a secondary influence from Italo disco).

She can't go back to that sound, because it sounds irretrievably late 90s; and the sound that she moved toward in the 00s and that has been most artistically fruitful for her is definitely not a U.S. mainstream sort of thing. (Electronic, frequently two-steppy.)

She married the guy who directed these videos, and one sort of suspects the breakup songs on This Is The One are about their divorce, which lends stuff like "Come Back To Me" more interest (she never used to write breakup songs).

Well, folk song "Asian melody" doesn't have blues scale. That's the big difference. Obv modern Asian pop does contain jazzy Westernized chords but to someone who grew up on Asian pop (eg. me) there is something faintly unnatural (or rather non-instinctive) about the basic twelve-bar blues progression. I have the barrier going the other way, which I've always suspected is the real explanation for why I like so proportionately little American music.

Two Western pop songs that sound very "Asian pop":

Madonna, "Taka A Bow"
Lady Gaga, "Love Mail"

Oddly enough lots of African music (Malian folk for one) is pentatonic and sounds weirdly indistinguishable to me from Chinese folk music, allowing for instrumentation. When I listen to Amadou and Mariam I find it difficult not to start riffing lyrics in Chinese.

My understanding (or misunderstanding) is that, among other things, the blues is the result of a collision between the European do-re-mi scale and (1) African pentatonic and sextatonic scales (if that's the right word for a six-note scale) and (2) rural English, rural Scottish, and rural Irish scales, also pentatonic because the do-re-mi scale hadn't totally penetrated to the countryside. So esp. in the American southeast where you get the interplay of a lot of people of African descent and rural English and Scots-Irish and Irish descent, the do-re-mi scale is used but with a lot of fucking around on the mi and the ti note - basically bending between the notes so you get neither the major key nor the minor key but rather are refusing to stay steady on a half-step (if that explanation makes sense), and also bending a lot between fa and sol (I'm not sure why, but such a bend is basic to Chuck Berry and hence to a lot of others). So I'd think that someone raised on pentatonic scales might be more comfortable with blues playing than with straight-up European-derived western playing (with major and minor chords), since blues is neither major nor minor. But then, you're talking of discomfort with the 12-bar blues progression, and that might be because the progression is too European, not because it's too blues.

The only Malian musician I know anything about is Ali Farka Touré, and interestingly he did go blues a bit, playing some John Lee Hooker boogie (though without the 12-bar progression); also recorded with Irish traditionalists the Chieftans, iirc.

Well, my grasp of musical theory is abysmal XD; (I actually have some sort of block for it, I think, it shouldn't be this hard to grok when I've close-listened to so much music.) So it's entirely possible I've gotten the wrong end of the stick. But to be fair, the last time I talked to my sister - who has a degree in Classical music and plays indie rock, and finds "this thing that Asian pop melodies do" irritating - she couldn't quite pin down what "this thing" was either.

As a child I was exposed to much more traditional Western classical music than to blues, rock, or non-vocal jazz. Whatever it is, is also something a lot of "easy listening" pop doesn't do - 60s girl groups, Carpenters, Belle and Sebastian.

The chorus of "Love Mail" is very folk but the verse melody sounds a lot like contemporary C-pop as well. In fact the whole thing sounds so familiar it may be cribbed off some Cantopop hit - I even find it difficult to parse in English.

Amadou and Mariam also play blues guitar, although again without the 12-bar (that I've heard).

OK, listening to "Love Mail," which I'd never heard before!, the part that sounds Asian to me, "Honey, e-mail me your love now/We don't use no words though/I don't need to hear your voice/Baby, mail your kisses to me/Send your touches into this love mail" [if I heard those lyrics right] uses what would be both the mi and the ti notes in the Western minor scale but avoids the half step by having no re or la notes.

I obviously don't know the relevant music theory, but that part (without the re or the la) does seem characteristically east Asian.

There appears to be controversy on YTube as to whether this is actually Lady Gaga at all!

What's happening in the left hand of "Love Mail" chord-wise is very similar to what's happening in this, which is the #1 track relevant to this discussion that makes me wish I had more theory so I can understand how it's made to work. But then again it's also what's going on in The Gossip's "Heavy Cross", as well as a billion other tracks. (And just by itself it doesn't sound "Asian" to me, it sounds "dubby".)

Not a music expert but just butting into say, there was a "fusion" trend in K-pop that drew on earlier forms of music (both traditional Korean as well as "trot" or ppongjjak which is derived from Japanese enka)--if you stumble across these songs, they might sound more obviously non-Western.

Also, what I would not call K-pop: stuff by Clazziquai, Cherry Filter, My Aunt Mary, and getting more out into the "indie" zone, Tearliner, Casker. (Using "indie" less in the sense of genre and more in the sense of produced by independent labels.) Well, this is disputable because K-pop itself is a diasporan/non-Korean term, but none of the groups I named have the sound of the major bands and solo artist that dominate the industry. orienkorean's Youtube channel has a lot of Korean groups that deviate from the typical K-pop sound though in some ways, they may come across as sounding even more Western.

I actually consider most R&B-style Korean artists to fall under K-pop; it's not "of late" because it's been going back for a while and many of those artists have been quite influential on the major bands/artists of today. See Brown Eyes, who were incredibly popular while I was growing up; Se7en is also fairly "old-school K-pop" in my opinion. (He dates back to my high school/early college years.)

Please butt in as much as you want. Who are your favorites?

Hm, pure K-pop-wise? I liked BoA, Wax, Uhm Jung-hwa, Lee Su-yeong and Park Jung-hyun (a.k.a. Lena Park) a lot. My friend went through a Kim Jong-kook phase a while back, so I have pretty much become a fan as well by sheer osmosis. (If you look up "사랑스러워" on Youtube, you'll see his major earworm hit.) Also liked Park Jung-ah and Lee Seung-gi, more recently (they're more pop/rock style).

Seo Taiji is really, really oldschool K-pop and he's been going in a completely different direction these days, but his later albums was what finally got me listening to K-pop after an adolescence of resisting it (I grew up in a Korean immigrant community, so I was surrounded by K-pop whether I liked it or not). Back then, what was popular was H.O.T., S.E.S., Brown Eyes, FinKL, and a little later, Bi and Fly to the Sky.

My latest favorite Korean groups are Apls (electronic group that can't make up its mind about what style it wants to be) and Bluedawn (which has already dissolved and become a new group)--I wouldn't call either of these K-pop though.

Oh and I just read the other referenced thread, and from my admittedly not-at-all representative experience, most of the differences in marketing the big SM groups is age. E.g. Super Junior is extremely popular among the elementary to middle school crowd, though obviously they have older fans too. I think SNSD also tends to be associated with younger female fans and Wonder Girls with older; not so sure if the age difference extends to male fans though. I would argue that the major class difference in listening preferences would be how much American/Western music you listen to, though sample size is too small to be positive on this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some videos, 2009

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject