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T-ara's Weird Year
Oct. 21st, 2013 05:42 amOkay, T-ara's really weird year was last year, but that was merely for what was being done to them in their lives. As for notes and singing and dancing and stuff, this year seems to be one tangent after another. Of course, "Number 9," their new Shinsadong Tiger single, is a return to top T-ara and resumes right where they left off with "Sexy Love" in September 2012. But my actual favorite T-ara product in 2013 has been most-inessential-member Qri's strange Bunny Style b-side in Japan, "Do We Do We," which sounds like perfect piffle from a previous dimly perceived galaxy of Italodisco. Here's a fan vid. [UPDATE: YouTube scotched the fan vid, so here's another one, using a Bunny Style still (ears are... I don't know, but it's not my world)[and that was scotched as well, so here's yet a third, ear-free).]
The only other track to hit me from the Bunny Style project (10 different releases with the same A-side and ten different B's) is "Maybe Maybe" from other officially inessential member Boram, the song trying to sound equally inessential, could do double duty as a commercial for air freshener. Without the apparent skill she outdoes Lim Kim and IU on the Ipanema tip. The rest of "Bunny Style" is as light and bright but far less engaging in its nothingness. (But I don't pretend to a feel for J-pop.)
(Btw,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arbitrary_greay and askbask have you heard this?)
( Target, Jeon Won Diary, Bikini, Painkiller )
So, to "Number 9" and Shinsadong Tiger: he's once again risking one hook too many and using song parts that no longer seem to flow one into the other in the way melodies used to flow back in the Korean old days of two years ago, though maybe those parts'll seem inevitable in their order once they get ground into me over multiple hearings, as finally happened with "Volume Up" and "Sexy Love," in any event seem to fit K-pop's growing formal ferment.
Jiyeon abandons her uninflected breathiness for actual emoting, the brief beginning of which ("neo manhi nal utge haneun") reminds me of the strong cross-ocean ache in Pajama Party's and Brenda K. Starr's "Over And Over"**; the song's passion is on her shoulders even more than Eunjung's, and she carries it. Although for the long run I'm uneasy if this turns out to be a change in Jiyeon's role,*** this time it works in the song's general pitch of T-ara joy and anxiety. To top everything, Hyomin does a bleaty barky thing in a "rap" that once again, typically for T-ara, is more compelling than most real rappers' real raps.
But maybe the year's top T-ara story is Qri and Boram finding themselves in a carefreeness that no one would believe from the others.
( Footnotes, Pajama Party, Robert Mitchum, rankings )
The only other track to hit me from the Bunny Style project (10 different releases with the same A-side and ten different B's) is "Maybe Maybe" from other officially inessential member Boram, the song trying to sound equally inessential, could do double duty as a commercial for air freshener. Without the apparent skill she outdoes Lim Kim and IU on the Ipanema tip. The rest of "Bunny Style" is as light and bright but far less engaging in its nothingness. (But I don't pretend to a feel for J-pop.)
(Btw,
arbitrary_greay and askbask have you heard this?)( Target, Jeon Won Diary, Bikini, Painkiller )
So, to "Number 9" and Shinsadong Tiger: he's once again risking one hook too many and using song parts that no longer seem to flow one into the other in the way melodies used to flow back in the Korean old days of two years ago, though maybe those parts'll seem inevitable in their order once they get ground into me over multiple hearings, as finally happened with "Volume Up" and "Sexy Love," in any event seem to fit K-pop's growing formal ferment.
Jiyeon abandons her uninflected breathiness for actual emoting, the brief beginning of which ("neo manhi nal utge haneun") reminds me of the strong cross-ocean ache in Pajama Party's and Brenda K. Starr's "Over And Over"**; the song's passion is on her shoulders even more than Eunjung's, and she carries it. Although for the long run I'm uneasy if this turns out to be a change in Jiyeon's role,*** this time it works in the song's general pitch of T-ara joy and anxiety. To top everything, Hyomin does a bleaty barky thing in a "rap" that once again, typically for T-ara, is more compelling than most real rappers' real raps.
But maybe the year's top T-ara story is Qri and Boram finding themselves in a carefreeness that no one would believe from the others.
( Footnotes, Pajama Party, Robert Mitchum, rankings )
