Athletic R&B: Miss A BREATHE

Watch on YouTube

Inspired to post this not just because I adore it, but also 'cause 67seven52 called "athletic R&B" his new favorite phrase. On this track, Miss A obviously put a lot of work into something that you'd think would feel light as a feather. Maybe if they'd put even more work into it, it would have actually seemed as light as that, and the effort would have been invisible. The sweat and strenuousness make it charming anyway, or make it especially charming, the performers give so much. Also love the way the song's love object, some guy over whom the girls are supposedly left breathless, is just a pretext for a bunch of clowning and panting, more a group bonding thing than an infatuation.

I want to know where the style of that intro to the chorus comes from, the one that starts the song and that recurs in front of the second verse and whenever the chorus reappears. Sounds like Verdi, or operetta, or Gilbert & Sullivan. Should ask Jonathan Bogart. Excellent for the way it throws gossamer and confetti over the basic squealing-brake techno 'n' r&b that follows. And then the live routine pulls a hilarious variation on the James Brown collapse-and-revival routine (starts at 3:27). (Song's producer, Park Jin-young, is obviously a big James Brown fan.)

( Athletes )

( Amid Footwear Mishap, Plucky Performer Perseveres )

[EDIT April 2024: The comment thread for this post became one of the most important ever for me, owing to askbask using it to create a kind of primer of the best dancers and choreography in K-pop at that time. Unfortunately, the thread is almost unreadable now for a whole bunch of reasons: Some of the embeds were uploads that got deleted from YouTube, and even where they weren't deleted, the old standard LiveJournal embed code used shockwave flash, and LJ will no longer show embeds with shockwave flash. Etc. – And if you're reading this on Dreamwidth, the Dreamwidth platform doesn't have the capability of showing embeds in comments anyway. Normally I'd try to fix the thread by adding new embeds and comments, but this thread is now too much of a mess. So instead I've created a whole new post (April 28, 2024) devoted to recreating as much of the comment thread as possible. Here's the link for it, "Hoisted from the archives: Athletic R&B comments reconstituted." (I'm linking you the Dreamwidth version because Dreamwidth gives us better-looking blockquotes, but I've posted it on LJ as well.)]