Some videos, 2009

[koganbot]

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.

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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?"

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

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

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

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Timberlee f. Tosh "Heels"

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Zero"

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Britney Spears "If You Seek Amy"

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Taylor Swift "White Horse"

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Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me"

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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]:

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Comments

[koganbot]

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

[askbask.livejournal.com]

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.

[koganbot]

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.)

[askbask.livejournal.com]

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.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

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.

[koganbot]

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."

[petronia.livejournal.com]

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.

[koganbot]

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.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

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

[koganbot]

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.

[koganbot]

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.