The end of today all over the sky

[koganbot]

Trying to start a conversation over on poptimists about the new IU video ("Good Day"):

http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/793519.html

By the way, what would you say are the best IU tracks? I've heard very few of them. I like the one variously translated as "MIA," "Missing Child," and "Lost Child"; and I totally love her live version of "Gee"/"Sorry, Sorry."

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[askbask.livejournal.com]

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

[(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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

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.

[(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.

[koganbot]

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

[askbask.livejournal.com]

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)