Volume Up: Genius or Stuffed Giraffe? (Part One)

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I think of Shinsadong Tiger tracks as catchy and spare, with some interesting musical countermotions but not overstuffed with them. 4minute's "Hot Issue" is a brilliant example (to be talked about in some later post), and is one of five or so tracks in the running for Frank's Favorite K-pop Track Ever. 4minute's new one, "Volume Up," feels like a radical departure: it's ambitious, it's full of stuff — stuff tumbling over other stuff — and it fucks radically with song form. Or at least it feels as if it's fucking with its form. I said to myself, "Shinsadong Tiger is fucking with us severely." And I sat down to diagram the thing, to figure out the game he was playing, and I went, "Hmmm, well some parts repeat, and if you call this the prechorus, and what comes after it the chorus, well…" And what I came up with was:

Verse → Chorus → Verse → Chorus → Middle Eight → Break → Chorus

Which is to say it's standard as fuck, doesn't screw with song structure at all. Except, I still think he's screwing with us. For one thing, the part I ended up calling the "prechorus" is a crescendo, and its effect when it first comes along is to make you think, or feel (since you don't put it into words),"OK, this cancels everything before it, makes that all prelude or preface or intro, and what comes after is the song proper; so here we go, we're starting with the verse." And what comes next sounds like a verse, rumbling along jaunty and energetic but not trying for a payoff — except it's the first section of what I've labeled "Chorus," above, in order to ram the song into verse-chorus format. Another peculiarity, which helped send my perception of form into confusion, is that several parts of the song end with a high-pitched wailing vocal that keeps going, soaring above and then spilling into the next part of the song. And what end up actually functioning as payoffs are recurring motifs (I'm calling them "motifs" rather than "riffs" or "hooks" because, as I said, the song feels ambitious — which doesn't mean it's not totally the opposite of grim; it doesn't carry a sign on it that says "funny," since it's not a joke song; but there's a deadpan playfulness, sending itself, without officially winking at us, over the top), for instance, a number of "oh oh oh oh ohs" and "eh eh eh eh ehs" declaimed by the group as if they were comic operetta singers out on parole, fanning out across the countryside (in the video, the women of 4minute are stationed in a medieval castle or cathedral, dressed in motley colors, as visual antigoths, I suppose; but when hearing the music I envision them traveling fields and hills and hamlets, serenading an uneasy populace and perplexing the local constabulary) and fanning out across the song as well, the variously cascading "ahs" and "ehs" and "ohs" recurring in different melodies in different sections. In addition, we've got a muted sax playing a moody, pensive line at song's start and then reappearing in the chorus but this time as the exuberant splash at the end of one of the spillover vocal wails I mentioned earlier.

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( Pun, another diagram, genius )