Frank Kogan

Supporters on youtube will call every artist 'real' if given the opportunity to contrast it to someone they don't like. T-ara's probably been called by plenty of enthusiastic fans as well. Admittedly her album is called REAL, but that can mean a lot of things. I haven't noticed this arrogance you refer to in any significant way and The T-ara comparison seems a bit far-fetched.

As for the answer to Frank's question -- MIA was her debut single but it was before she'd built up a following, obviously, and didn't do gangbuster numbers. Thus they tried a different strategy, more cutesy lead singles (like 'Marshmallow') which isn't bad, but lead to her saying things like she wanted to do music that was more 'her'* and during this period I feel she got more famous for all the acoustic covers she did (from Korean folk classics
to Cyndi Lauper and various American RnB artists plus a hundred others).

* I suspect this is where Anonymous got his objections -- they tried to sell her in what was perceived as a generic pop idol packaging and the fans protested that that's not what she should do. And they were totally right! It has nothing to do with being realer than anyone else and everything to do with people loving her other side (which she started out with) more.

Having said that, I did enjoy this pretty cutesy j-rock-sounding single

and this cute song with a Kylie-aping video

..but my favorite duet of hers

From: (Anonymous)

Side effects of writing things at 4 AM: yes, comparing whatever I found in the music from that track (I don’t really like much T-ara) with this discourse about real (authentic, natural) beings vs. prefabricated products (because is something that I don’t find it, at least right now, in IU’s music) doesn’t make much sense.

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koganbot

Well, without knowing the particulars of T-ara and IU, I'll say nonetheless that "the real" is an issue that's simply never going to go away, at least not in my lifetime and probably not in the next several centuries. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this persistence, among them being that in the modern economic world that was invented in the "West" over the last 500 years, people - as economic individuals with their labor to sell - have become increasingly mobile both physically and socially ("socially" includes being mobile across classes and cultures), which means that roles and behavior have to keep shifting. The thing is, you can't be everything to everybody; you have to have at least some reliability and consistency or else no one's going to do business with you. Yet you have to remain flexible, not just in regard to what role to play but also in regard to which rules to adopt and which to set aside.

It's precisely because the real keeps shifting that it's an issue that no one can duck. Not to make choices as to what's real is simply not to live your life. Not to have an opinion on which music is real is simply not to care about music. You don't have the option not to choose. Someone can pretend to know better than to care about authenticity, but such indifference is a shuck.

But what's real today can be fake tomorrow. For example, if you locate the real in your willingness to take risks, to stand for something before you know that you'll be rewarded for doing so, then once you've been rewarded, the move can't be repeated. But just finding new risks and opposing authority for the sake of doing so ends up as a shtick, if you've got no good reason for doing something other than that the crowd and the authorities don't like it. And anyway, opposition to authority can be routinized and marketed too.

Back in my fanzine in 1988 Steven Sherman wrote that Springsteen changed his image as much as David Bowie did. But I'd say the difference is that Springsteen always chose plausible images, what he or you could look like in day-to-day life, or could if he'd never been a star. Whereas Bowie always goes for implausible images - not that he won't dress like that offstage, but that there's something about the image that says "This isn't me, it's something I'm putting on to symbolize my desire and my possibilities, even if I'm not really a spaceman or Greta Garbo." But he's not being inauthentic; what he's doing is to claim control over the imagery, to take responsibility for it, to place honesty in the gap between his reach and his grasp and to place reality in the future. I'm assuming, without knowing anything about it, that IU is more or less in the Springsteen role and e.g. Orange Caramel are in the Bowie position (though E.via may be more to the point here, since she simultaneously mocks the cuteness while outcuting all the other cutiepies). Everybody gets to play dressup in videos, but IU is plausibly girlie (whether she wants to be or not) while Orange Caramel are playing little girlie dolls, signaling to us that they're something else. Neither strategy is honest or dishonest in itself, real or fake in itself. You have to judge how well and truly they comport themselves from song to song, from video to video. And I assume that underlying this is a quite fraught relationship with "girliness" and "femininity," and whether or how much those roles are corrupted by the oppression of women or validated by viable gender roles - just as it's fraught in the U.S., though I assume (again without knowing) that in Korea the issues may be intensified by having to have made the shift from a traditionalist bureaucratic culture to a "modern" one in little more than a century and for having been an occupied country for a big hunk of that time.

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koganbot

My grammar got away from me in that last sentence, since it's Korea and not "the issues" that had to make the shift to modernity. How about:

...in Korea the issues may be intensified by Korea's having to have made the shift from a traditionalist bureaucratic culture to a "modern" one in little more than a century and for its having been an occupied country for a big hunk of that time.

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koganbot

they tried to sell her in what was perceived as a generic pop idol packaging and the fans protested that that's not what she should do. And they were totally right!

Well, some of the fans must have liked the cutesy pop idol tracks, or those records wouldn't have sold in the first place, and there'd have been no fans to even have an opinion about the style.

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I should've said "the fans commenting on such things in places I frequent" and I should note that these fans may go "I like her, but this song..." or "I liked MIA, but not Marshmallow" and it's not necessarily that they hated her cutesy songs, but always followed it up with "she can do better" or "she can be different". And I suspect that Anon may read the same kinds of things as I do, at least that was my assumption when replying to his characterization of her fans.

I could've agreed with him more if he said that people are projecting their hopes of what she's going to become onto her, and using that as an argument for her qualities as much as what she actually is releasing. How their hopes of seeing something akin to a 'self-made' k-pop star going big makes them criticize any deviation from that path. And that I may find myself in that group, just because I've ended up watching her re-arrange SNSD and SuperJunior ten times more than music videos of her singles, and dreaming of seeing that on Music Bank or Inkigayo but with her own words. (But also because she's said it herself)

If you take the silliest kind of youtube comment into consideration it's easier to understand why someone could get tired of some of her fans:

"Gawd, what did they turn this acoustic loving teen into?! THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHITT! THEIR CONFORMING HER INTO THE WHOLE 'ADORABLE,CUTEINOCCENT' KOREAN STARS! Shit makes me angry. She sounded better with her own kind of music. Just my opinions"

What most people are more likely to say is "this performance of someone else's song is frikkin great, I wish her singles were more like it." And they don't need to fantasize to hear that her voice is great and her guitar plucking is more than pleasant, and they express a wish to see this displayed as part of a promotional campaign instead. Although proficency with an instrument doesn't really seperate her from idols, she has done much more herself to show off her creative side than, say, Seohyun. And that may just be because she's a solo artist, or that her label is more lenient in letting her play around and do what she wants to do, but it certainly nurtures a special kind of interest in fans who take that as the real her.

And certainly there are those who liked her cutesy songs better, and I will admit I have no clue what fans in Korea are saying, but sales-wise she hasn't taken off until this year (total sales numbers aren't that easy to come by, but she hasn't received any awards on music shows before).

Reception to 'Good Day' and the album has been positive indeed.

Just yesterday we reported that Sistar had taken over all of the music charts. However, their reign was short lived, as IU has just taken over all of Melon, Dosirak, Soribada, Mnet.com and Bugs music charts. Not only is "Good Day" first on all charts, but the rest of the songs in her album are amongst top ten in the charts.

From: (Anonymous)

On my first comment I was only signalling how people tend to think that “melancholic” music is deeper (meaning that is closer to authentic art) that other music that don’t use those stylistic devices. You only need to check almost any end of year list from music magazines to see that: endless "masterworks" from indie bands singing about how their cats turn to the left instead of the right or how the water boils in heartfelt voices and ad hoc arrangements (using glockenspiel if possible). And that deepness, etc. is what people want to project about themselves. So what I was saying is that I don’t think that this song about getting lost on your own dreams and that song about getting lost on your own dreams is better for using those devices, only for how they make me lost myself on them.

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koganbot

YouTube has deleted the Korean folk classic before I had a chance to listen.

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It's the song tarigwa argues is a ballad non-classic in the comments below and which I linked there because she performs it with the host, a singer/songwriter/++ who started out in the early 90s, and that fit with our talk of IU aligning herself with a certain crowd of artists.

I'll embed it here

(one of the Korean-language commenters on youtube is saying that she's too young to know 'old love', the title of the song)

From: (Anonymous)

In my case I also make value and aesthetic judgments, I select which experiences are meaningful to me and which ones not, so in that sense some are real for my tastes. Or to put it in another way, the ways some artistic object shapes my worldview make me appreciate it for what it proposes, for how it affects me or how I let myself be affected by it (leaving emotional barriers aside, or shame, or mental images about myself). For me that’s not so much the problem as the way people use that debate to protect themselves from those experiences or at least make them acceptable to their surroundings. I’ve been reading bits from “The Science of Passionate Interests: An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde’s Economic Anthropology” and I liked the next quote:

“How can we explain the fact that economists made such a serious mistake concerning the recto and verso of their science? The reason given by Tarde goes along with what market anthropologists have shown again and again over the past decade or so: no relationship is economic without there being an extension of the calculation techniques of economists-in the broadest sense of the word. The field of economics, invented in the 18th century, did not discover a continent; instead, it built one from scratch, or, rather, organized one, conquered it, and it colonized it. To quote Michel Callon's powerful phrase, it is the economic discipline that frames and shapes the economy as an entity: 'Without economics, no economy." Contrary to the robinsonades of the 18th century, and just as Karl Polanyi and later Marshal Sahlins had so skillfully shown, man is not born an economist, he becomes one. On condition, however, that he is surrounded by enough instruments and enough calculative devices to render otherwise imperceptible differences visible and readable. To practice economics is not to reveal the anthropological essence of humanity; it is to organize in a certain way something elusive”.

So just thinking (reading about economic devices is boring) these days which are the equivalent to those “instruments and calculative devices” but in tastes about music, movies and the rest… Do the real vs. fake debate, as usually seen, work as one of them? Do the way people talk about idols, being sublime or lifeless puppets, caring about them or showing all their weakness, work also as one (and one we can’t leave aside but that we could make more accurate…)?

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I liked that cover too, but The Marshmallow Song so traumatized me (previous to this convo - I saw it on a screen I happened to be sitting in front of at a... restaurant? bubble tea parlour? I didn't know who the singer was) that I haven't dared to look up more of her stuff. My tolerance for cute/twee is high but my tolerance for burikko is extremely low. XD; If it's not representative I'll check out the rest.

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Come to think of it twee vs. burikko is also an authenticity debate LOLOL

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It's not! You should listen to her new single Good Day, and the album tracks on her new mini-album, none of which come close to sounding like Marshmallow.

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koganbot

I hadn't run across the term "burikko" until I read your comment (unless you told me about it before, and I forgot). Does "the core meaning of burikko remains that of a woman who displays bogus innocence" (this statement found on the Web here) correspond to what you mean by the term? If so, it most certainly does raise authenticity issues.

I also hadn't heard "Marshmallow" until this very moment. My cultural reading here is poor enough that I can't tell whether the bogusness is on display - like, watch me! I'm being bogus! - or if the basic premise is "Watch her act like a little girl." In any event, I haven't heard enough IU to generalize, but "MIA/Missing Child" is sure different from "Marshmallow": the singing is almost like freestyle in its passion, and in the video IU is menaced by bleached-white gollums who seem to have escaped from the haunted dance club of Laura Branigan's "Self Control" and are now inhabiting a contaminated, frigid forest. I suppose that one could take IU to represent "innocence threatened" in the video (I can't tell you anything about the lyrics), but it's not particularly girlishness or sweetness that's represented, just vulnerability.

I'm sure Mat's right about the unrepresentativeness of "Marshmallow," and that there's plenty of promise in this budding star, with no predetermined path necessarily laid out for her. (Not that "Marshmallow" shows no talent, mind you.)

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I don't remember mentioning it before but very well could have: IMO it's an essential concept for understanding Asian pop since the 80s, insofar as it involves constructs of femininity/girlishness/cuteness, not to mention idol culture.

The IU PMV (yes, I put myself through it again!) does rather enter the realm of conscious artifice - burikko suru, per the book you linked, a gender performance, related to camp (if Nicki Minaj performed this set of physical movements in a music video I suspect we'd read it as camp). IU is in actual male drag for part of this, notably. I'm not sure whether the campiness is intentional, given that her audience seems very aware this is not "the real her", or if the whole attempt was just a bit faily on the part of her label XD; (apart from the song which is genuinely if annoyingly catchy).

I went and watched some vintage Matsuda Seiko vids, since she is still the gold standard in matters burikko, and she was a lot more subtle about it - still very controlled, even though she makes it look natural. To me the semiotics of this body language aren't even "burikko" so much as they are "pop idol". If I were playing charades this is how I would convey "idoru": elbows tucked close, toes pointed in, head tilted forward or to the side, poodle-skirt-flouncing side sway. Although that could just be the 80s, the side sway was really widespread.

Some of this stuff was codified long before Western pop. (The kimono is designed to promote the elbows-and-toes-pointed-in stance.) My $0.02 theory is that there was some sort of perfect-storm collision with whatever it was in the water globally during the 80s that produced early Kylie (very cute, although not burikko), early Mylene Farmer (burikko made perverse, but terrible at it all the same), and... yeah. The French are culturally prone like the Japanese, but the focus is more "underage" than "cute", there. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Vanessa Paradis, Alizee.

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Matsuda Seiko also had (has - it hasn't changed at all) the Voice, an aspect that was entirely natural to her as far as I can tell.

Also, I ended up watching SNSD's live cover of "I'm Your Girl", in which they actually do S.E.S.'s dance, as far as I can tell. Which is very different from SNSD's normal choreography, being a product of the Max Martin teen-girls-in-giant-cargo-pants era. (S.E.S. was contemporaneous to and probably had the same listenership in Asia as M2M, though you can probably tell that from the song itself.)

Edited Date: 2010-12-11 07:48 am (UTC)

From:

koganbot

I hadn't thought I'd heard of S.E.S. until this very moment, though my browsing history says that I've listened to their version of "I'm Your Girl" (one of you all must have embedded it for me at some point). Definitely need to explore more.

I hear M2M in the sound, all right, though M2M didn't have the dance or the hip-hop. (The vid does include hired dancers, however; covering the bases, I guess.) My sense of M2M is likely distorted by subsequent events, the American teen confessional that they foreshadowed*, but they carried with them an air of being complicated girls who wrote poetry and kept diaries, which is probably exactly what they were. Don't know if that aspect was a big thing for their Asian audience, or if there was a contemporary Asian teenpop equivalent, or if the image of the teen poetry girl was included in the Korean girl groups. Wouldn't be surprised if it was.

*I also wouldn't be surprised if the words to Avril's "Complicated" were inspired by Marit's verse on "Give A Little Love," except Avril had to go and make things less complicated:

Did Hoku ever get much of an Asian audience? She was kind of halfway between the poetry girls and the dancing girls (though she's not on the writing credits)(and perhaps the main reason I associate her with M2M is that Chuck Eddy put both her and them on a mixtape he made for me in 2000).

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koganbot

If I'd just listened to Matsuda Seiko without looking she'd have reminded me of the early '60s American girl group singers, the Ronettes and such, many of whom dressed like bad girls in their time (which was about when Matsuda Seiko was born). There's little in the arrangement and the style - until the synthpop song at the tail end - to tell me that this music is the '80s and not 1962.

Her singing is excellent. But is her innocence bogus? The performances seem fundamentally straightforward, though of course the frilliness is a form of dress-up (i.e., I don't assume those are what she wears on the street). But "dressed-up" doesn't mean "bogus." It does, I suppose, indicate a choice, that since you can don the role, you can take it off, too. But I wouldn't say I see that in the Seiko vids, that she could easily choose not to look like that. I mean, how you look onstage doesn't match how you look at funerals, which doesn't match what you look like in the grocery store, but that doesn't mean you necessarily feel that you can hop from style to style within each of those particular environs, once you've established a style.

I'm struggling here with a concept I don't grasp intuitively.

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The perception of bogusness w/r/t Seiko has to do with the context at the time - there was something of a divide between the popular singers who behaved cutely/girlishly, versus the ones who did not. In particular, Nakamori Akina was set up as Seiko's rival and ideological opposite: a mature-sounding, sophisticated, "real" singer (powerful vocalist) and "real" woman (ownership of her sexuality). I mean, if you just look at their song titles, Seiko's are all "Sparkly Angel Kisses" and Akina's are all "Passionate Tears of Desire" or whatever. And the Akina type of "mature" female singer has a longer history in Japan - enka, as

troisroyaumes mentioned - so it was the Seiko type that needed a new word in the 80s.

The kicker is that Seiko was the one who was nakedly careerist - that is, she refused to retire after marriage, which for Japan at the time was as outre as Madonna. She dated celebrities. She had extramarital affairs. She dated foreigners who wrote tell-all books. In a major Debbie-Liz, Jen-Angelina moment, she stole Akina's boyfriend, and Akina attempted suicide. Somehow her career survived all this.

(If anything there is a lesson for Taylor Swift here, both in terms of who she seems to be as a person and how she's perceived - and how ppl assume she wants/is trying to be perceived.)

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koganbot

I'd have thought of Mylène Farmer as bogus sophistication, not bogus innocence, though the only videos I've seen of hers are "Libertine" and "Désenchantée." She is playing a kid in the latter, but not necessarily an innocent (I think we're expected to go "oh, poor thing!" at the start; but urchins are supposedly wised-up, not innocent, except in the sense of "not guilty"). I actually think "Désenchantée" is a great song. The videos for that and "Libertine" strike me as very good, but also unbelievably kitsch, with a sense of shameless opportunism. I really don't know if we're expected to be taken in by them or expected to play along with them, as if we're in on the game. I probably don't understand France any more than I understand Korea. I thought the point of Alizee's "Moi Lolita" was that she was underage but not innocent. Merely underage. (Which is what you're saying, right?) I guess she could be "innocent" in the sense that 'cause she's young she gets to be careless, maybe.

I remember Vanessa Paradis' attempt at an American LP coming across as just plain stupid, with possibly the worst version of "Femme Fatale" in history. However, although there's an air of knowingness and risk about Farmer's "Libertine" video that I find completely phony - knowingness that's not supported by any knowledge - at the same time I'm impressed by its gall. It has a kind of reach. I don't hate it at all, not in the way that I hate the knowing tone of the average snide rock critic, which is just small and crabbed.

I guess that "Libertine" was an actual risk, in that Farmer hadn't had any big hit up to that moment, so she and Boutonnat were rolling the dice bigtime on "Libertine," with everything in the pot.

Is there a word for bogus sophistication, not the sort of sophistication that's merely phony, but sophistication that knows and tells you it's phony?

Mary Martin's original "My Heart Belongs To Daddy" strikes me as bogus innocence and bogus sophistication, the innocence of course being a self-conscious put-on, whereas I don't know if Porter et al. were aware of how silly the "sophistication" was, though maybe he knew that it was innocuous underneath, just a gesture towards worlds of complication that his songs didn't actually deliver. Don't think that that kind of knowingly naughty "innocence" is what you mean by "burikko" anyway, but I'm not sure if you're saying that when it comes across as a donned "innocence" that we're in on, that it's burriko, but that when it crosses over into camp it's a failure. And do we need necessarily to be in on it?

IU seems plausibly girlie, whether she's playing dress-up or not; whereas Orange Caramel are dressing as if they stepped from the pages of a pre-schooler's picture book, young women in their very late teens in costume as little dolls. But not camp, as far as I can tell, though I'm not sure why I say it isn't. And I guess scores or maybe hundreds of performers are doing the same thing, though my ignorant impression is that most of them are Japanese, not Korean. It's kind of off-putting - well, not that I necessarily react against it so much as I almost have no reaction to it at all, other than "I don't quite get it." And that's not how the Orange Caramels dress when they're in After School.

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One of the Orange Caramel-members is in fact not in her teens at all anymore. It's odd, because they almost have a supermodel look to them with their long legs, and it just seems grotesque to put them in cheap girly Halloween costumes.

I disagree with more than a few things in this recent commentary on k-pop vs j-pop idols - http://neojaponisme.com/2010/12/09/2010-k-idols-vs-j-idols/ - mostly when he tries and fails to talk about the music, but he does observe real differences in presentation:

"The Japanese industry has always told us that consumers like barely-trained, not-too-good-looking, off-pitch idols" and the idea of idol group members as the 'average girl' or as he says "little sister", ie no j-idol who dresses like Orange Caramel's Nana looks like Orange Caramel's Nana.

From: (Anonymous)

One of the problems I have with scholarly articles about Japanese culture (pop most likely), is that they use a series of concepts to examine a culture that is, at least lately, immersed in feedback with their own references, creating micro-niches and micro-variations on themes and riffs already overexploited for decades, and that those concepts are so general as to feel like empty containers or a bit like using dated slang to refer maybe the same things the younger generation are doing, but with new traditions, memes, senses, etc. (Another problem I have with them is how most of them doesn’t value at all the cultures they are talking about (skips the idols, they are empty, let’s talk about mainstream artists with real contents that I happen to like!). Oh, and another one: everyone in Japan is a pervert, so if there are examples of cultural trends that are quite extreme (like shotakon or eleven-years old gravure DVDs), everything that could be identified with those extreme examples are softer expressions of the dark truth).

There is manga, “Bakuman” about a couple of guys that want to become mangakas and each time that they are pitching a new idea, they explain how the conventions of every genre are used (like when they explain the love story that triggers all the plot the manga is going to have, like “Bakuman”). If anybody is interested on that, I can put some examples from there. If not, you only need to check some conventions from this video. I don’t really know why they do this, but when I tried to learn the writing, maybe had some glimpse of how they are accustomed to think that way (different “drawings” combine themselves to form new meanings, new words (always with the same sounds)).

I only heard once before the term burikko. It was in a quite repellent moe-oriented website that usually publishes polls about what boys hate girls doing or the reverse one. Usually they are mortifying, narrow minded and are mere excuses for quite colourful commentary about gender, the country and the rest. So one of the things guys hated was that the girl pretended to be cute, that she was burikko. Having in mind that as mentioned, that website is quite found on a very particular form of cuteness (moe), that usually derives in all sort of sexual fantasies about moe characters, maybe is a misuse of the term “burikko” and what is acceptable for them is not so much for society. The most known example of moe anime right now.

These girls are Onyanko Club. They are acting like teenagers but the lyrics are talking about having sex and taking off their school uniforms. So there is a divergence between the presentation and the contents.

From: (Anonymous)

These girls are AKB48 doing a medley from idol songs from the 80’s included the one before (the guy that write the lyrics for their songs is the same guy that wrote for Onyanko Club but I think that sex is presented in a different light in this group). With each song, they adopt the style of their original performers. You can even check some surprised faces between them when they start with the last one. My theory is that current idol groups play with the conventions of cuteness as a way of presenting themselves, not necessarily in ironic ways, but like things that they have to do because that is what their audience wants.

The same girl criticising one girl (age 23) every time that she acts as a little girl and at the end presenting herself as a cute girl (her real image is closer to the first one). When some of the main girls graduated from high-school they said that starting that day they were “cosplaying” each time they were in the group (because the school uniforms are not part of their own life anymore). So if some girl always does this cute image, is just an accepted way of presenting themselves or acting as an archetype (like the yankee one, the bad guy that has a way of walking, sitting, talking, etc.). Again, AKB48 girls going yankee for the opening credits of their own dorama “Majisuka Gakuen”.

These girls are Ebisu Muscats. Most of them are pornstars. The song obviously is mocking some ideas about innocence and idols (because you know, they are “used” and the banana is the banana and the mango is…). Funny thing, it only works because they adhere to the idol genre conventions. The thing is that they are not mocking their own cuteness in the way they present themselves (check their third single, the PV has some sort of documentary feel about it: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xft9d0_yyyyyyyy-yyyyyy-pv_music), just the excess of artificiality that comes out of nowhere. Anyway I’m going to read that article that was linked above (found a PDF copy). Like I said above, never tried to make much sense of it, because everything else in show business over there falls inside of some image container according to age, sex, etc.

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I'm thinking of an even earlier Mylene Farmer (I wouldn't have said "Libertine" and later was part of this debate - she figured out the sexiness that worked for her, which has nothing to do with innocence bogus or otherwise, and stuck with it). "Maman a tort" and "Plus grandir", more like. Those are some fucked up videos. But that first album was not bad musically. And of course, there's a strand of Japanese goth (visual kei) rock that took both the earlier and later templates and ran with them very, very far indeed.

I'm tempted to say all French "sophistication" comes off as bogus sophistication to American tastes, but that's me jumping ahead unsupported to the epigram. XD For the most part I see classic-period Mylene Farmer videos as over-the-top spectacle, theatre, in which she's an actress playing a role - sometimes seductress, sometimes ingenue, but even when she's ingenue the audience remembers she was the seductress last time. That sort of "which Madonna/Gaga are we getting today" curiosity, if Madonna/Gaga had more of a Kate-Bush-ian offbeatness. (Mylene's offbeatness being more intentional than Kate Bush's.)

Vanessa Paradis: again only in reference to her debut ("Joe Le Taxi"), in which she was simply an unadorned, slightly gawky teenaged girl wearing realistic street clothes, singing a song. And so was Alizee in "Moi Lolita", appearance-wise; and the tATu of the early singles. The latter two examples being deliberate, styled not to evoke an ideal of burikko girlishness but a more authentic actual-young-girl-ness appealing to, I dunno, the more realism-inclined dirty old man. The Ur-video-girl in France almost certainly being the Charlotte Gainsbourg of "Lemon Incest".

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koganbot

Reposting the vid (assuming this is the one you meant):

[Error: unknown template video]

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Hm, she reminds me a bit of some older K-pop solo artists:

이수영 e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdTlRg-qPmk
Wax e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMTr7-eXV3s
박졍현 e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8crYjX7eam0

Her image does read as a lot more conservative to me. I don't know if that necessarily translates to being more "real" though, since it still comes across as very carefully constructed (a lot of appeal to nostalgia). I wonder if her fanbase skews older, since I think both her music style and image would appeal to an older demographic (around mid-20s to mid-30s would be my guess?).

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You're right, from an interview earlier this year:

"When we asked her which singer she wanted to do a duet with (like how she did a duet with Seulong), she didn't choose any idols near her age. Instead, she chose singers who were at least 10 years older than her."

..and she named Harim as the singer she respected the most.

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Interesting! I'd be interested in listening to a duet like that. Do you have a link to the original interview by any chance?

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Here http://www.koreantopnews.com/story.php?title=news-iu-she-heard-the-word-sunbaenim-from-victoria-and-seo-inkook-who-are-5-years-older-than-her

The author does wax lyrical to regrettable lengths at times. Be warned! I see that she mentions 이수영 now.

(She has done several performances with one of those old guys, Yoo Hee Yeol, on his show, where she was a regular guest for a while. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4IZaZXmS4E )

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And you probably know Yoon Jong Shin? He wrote on of the songs on her album.

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Also, hah, I knew I recognized her voice from somewhere. She did two tracks for the Queen Seondeok OST. Makes sense because my instinct after hearing her was to think that she sounded like a K-drama soundtrack sort of singer.

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koganbot

Am listening to IU's Real EP now, and in some ways it sounds even older than that - not counting "Good Day," it sounds like a Korean equivalent to the "beautiful music" of the '50s and '60s that got played on square stations in the U.S. that were trying to pretend that rock 'n' roll never happened - or more accurately, the style as it regrouped itself in the '70s (taking account of soul and rock) with more of a beat. I guess there are occasional touches that make Real, you know, post–Whitney Houston, brief quasi-gospel flourishes,** and there's enough acoustic guitar to make me hear elements of the more gentle singer-songwriters. But that Lena Park track you linked sounds downright modern compared to Real, as if Lena were storming through the most recent American Idol.*

Anyway, IU sings well enough on Real that I'm trying to overcome the tendency for this style to go in one of my ears and out the other.

*Checking Wikip, it turns out that Lena is American. And, intriguingly, just last spring, at age 34, she graduated from Columbia with a degree in English literature.

**And "Good Day," which gets better with each listen, has plenty of disco in it.

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I meant "older" in relation to Korean pop music history; I'm afraid that I haven't listened to U.S. pop enough to have any basis for comparison there. I can definitely say that IU doesn't resemble Korean pop during the 50s and 60s, because the dominant style then was derived from Japanese enka (it's called trot or ppongjjak). I guess there was an acoustic ballad phase during the 70s/80s--I'd buy that IU is drawing influence from there, but I wouldn't say that she necessarily sounds more similar to them than to Wax.

I mean, the "folk song" linked by

askbask isn't a classic but a ballad song from 1991 by 이문세, if you want a good comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZRSry1KH2M

Yes, Lena Park is Korean-American, though so are a lot of other Korean entertainers. I did think the resemblance was the least obvious with her but she has songs that are less thoroughly R&B.

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it is a classic tho!

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Haha, sorry, different definitions of "classic" operating here. I guess I was thinking something more like 남행열차 as "classic" but obviously that's a pretty high threshold to set...

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koganbot

Presenting The real Nicole Scherzinger:

BBC: I imagine that record labels constantly come to you asking for "something that sounds like Poker Face".

RedOne: Yes, all the time. And I say, "no - because that's Gaga!"

That's her sound. I made that music, yes, but I made it for Gaga, because that's her. That's what she breathes.

I'm not doing any more of what I call "fast food writing" - where people demand a single, a single, a single. No. If you want me to invest my time in you, you need to invest yourself in me, as an artist.

BBC: So you're saying you've been guilty of that in the past?

RedOne: Yes, but not any more. Because that's what I love from the old times. You listen to Stevie Wonder and it could only be Stevie Wonder. Led Zeppelin is the same. I think that's missing nowadays.

Take Nicole Scherzinger [former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman], I just finished her album. Her last one never came out because it was collecting hamburgers, like fast food. One from McDonalds, one from Burger King, and so on. It tasted good, but it wasn't consistent.

Her new record - people are really going to go crazy about it because it's the real her.

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New IU single

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and a new track, "Cruel Fairy Tale"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8x9SsZIg0o

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koganbot

Oh, this is superb (and I like "Cruel Fairy Tale," too). Is the piano player someone famous? And the girl on the bed?

They sub the lyrics but not the dialogue before and after. What would you say is going on? The lyrics seem basically to be "You were leaving for good, you never actually felt love, but I was the last to know this."

There're also Alicia" and "Someday", both of which I'm meh about, though she sings them nicely.

My guess is that she's a star for a long time.

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The girl is an actress, Park Bo Young. The man on the piano is the composer, Yoonsang.

Spoken words:
“My body feels weird lately. It doesn’t feel like my body. Isn’t the weather really weird today? On days like this, I feel like someone might come to find me.”
- “Your father passed away, right?”
- “They all say that he’s my father, but he’s not.”

---

Yes.. I don't know what to expect from a song made for an online horse racing game, to be honest. "Someday" is from "Dream High", a series IU acts in, which is SORT OF a Korean 'Glee'. At least in that it's set in a school and they perform numbers. The difference is that real pop stars portray many of the students.

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That was me, not the regular Anon.

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koganbot

So "Alicia" is related to an online horse racing game? I'd assumed it was a movie.

Showing my age, I guess.

I see there's a version of "The Story Only I Didn't Know" on which IU is accompanied by a pianist called Kim Gwang Min, which is a different version from the one in the video; there are two versions of it on a just-released "Real+" mini-album.

So now we get EPs followed by deluxe versions of the same EPs? How long have they been doing that?

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