Classification query: Springloll

[koganbot]

Is this music indie or is it mainstream? Those categories give very different readings, but I really don't know. (Where but in indie do you get away with those wan sketchy vocals? The answer could be: in plenty of places.)

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[Poll #1666585]
(Also haven't determined if the spelling is Springloll (one word) or Spring loll (two words). And I prefer "주문을 걸어" - which Google translates as "Cast A Spell," a mainstream-seeming song title - to this song, but I couldn't find a video for it.)

Comments

[troisroyaumes]

To be honest, they end up calling "indie" anything that doesn't come out of a major label regardless of whether it actually sounds indie or not. ^^

I think it's one word "Springloll"; at least that's how it's referred to on all the Korean sites.

[koganbot]

I don't know if it's on an indie label or not. But I'm guessing there'd be a whole demographic difference between who's listening to it depending on whether it was perceived as mainstream or not, whatever term they use for it.

"Indie" used to just mean "independent label" in the U.S., too, though even back in the Fifties the word was loaded: during the Depression the markets for country and blues recordings collapsed, and the major labels abandoned those genres. After WWII it was independent labels who served these "specialty" markets, and these labels were best able to capitalize on the new music that arose, i.e., rock 'n' roll. The majors didn't make the same mistake in the Sixties of ignoring the market when rock came along and soul went big, and some formerly independent labels like Atlantic were bought up by the big labels in the early Seventies. After several major-label proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls fizzled commercially in the early Seventies, punk and new wave became the province of small labels in the mid to late Seventies, and these labels adopted the word "indie" for themselves, self-consciously looking back to the rock 'n' roll age of heroism. It was in the Eighties that "indie" began to denote a set of loosely related "alternative" styles of music that were vaguely descended from or in the milieu of the new wave.

[jonathanbogart.livejournal.com]

Dunno about indie or mainstream -- on a purely generic level (the rhythms, the chord structure) it's bossa nova, which has been both in different times and places and I couldn't begin to guess where it's at in South Korea, 2011. The sound reminds of mid-90s shibuya-kei, similarly informed by 60s international AM pop, and which if I understand correctly was mainstream (or at least successful) in Japan and indie (or at least underheard) in the West.

[koganbot]

Different Springloll songs seem to take a variety of different rhythmic/generic forms, which is one thing that marks Springloll as potentially indie - the Korean major-label stuff also being fairly magpieish as to musical sources but usually merging them into coherent dance-pop tracks rather than doing one song like this and another like that. But there were also a bunch of Latin-based sounds in mainstream K-pop in 2010. I don't know if this is typical or new, since I didn't really start paying attention to K-pop until recently. I'm intending to throw a few of these Latin-style songs at you soon, to get your reaction.

[koganbot]

Here's an undeniably mainstream Korean track, recently released, that sounds bossa nova in its rhythm - or, if not bossa nova (an area that I don't know at all well), surely Latin of some sort:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaFySKNpPWI

The singers are a girl group with r&b leanings called KARA, on a "Various Artists" album put together by Kim Hyung Suk, who I assume is a venerable instrumentalist and producer.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

1-up'ing you in mainstream-ness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLwh7aYB9Rc

[koganbot]

Interesting: the song doesn't really have a chorus. (Who is the singer? I've yet to distinguish one SNSD from another.)

[askbask.livejournal.com]

It's a duet between the two Americans, Jessica and Tiffany.

This video introduces you to the five official main vocalists of the group, and perhaps their different voices. Name tags show up after a while.

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[koganbot]

Ha! the only two SNSD'ers who've had an impact on me that I'm conscious of are nonmain vocalists Sooyung (because of the screaming fangirl vid you embedded, which made me realize that "Hoot" has some amazing stuff in it) and Yuri (because of her impressive version of "1,2 Step," which I hunted down while trying to make sense of butch-girl Amber of F(x) [haven't succeeded yet, and she was kinda meh doing her brief rap on this, in comparison to Missy Elliott and Teena Marie])(so, what do you think is going on with Amber?).

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I'm as confused as you. I've asked some fellow, female, SNSD fans, and their answers have not satisfied me. When she takes the mic, the female f(x) fans scream in unison like they do towards their favorite boy band members. Ten times stronger than with the other members. What I'm wondering is if/how SM Ent have basically managed to cheat their way to create sex appeal, among girls, for an all-girl group. Not that girls haven't been attracted to sexy female idols since forever, but there's that lust aspect here...

When I first saw the group, I thought she was just the 'cool member', the rapper, and also assumed that she might be the least popular one. Soon I realized the opposite was true. At the end of the day she's a girl, and the fans know she's a girl, so what's their internal logic in favoring her? Youtube comments are filled with more than the usual dose of "I'd go gay for ____" when it comes to Amber. I WOULD appreciate a smart individual of the opposite sex writing about this, because my head is spinning.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

Fellow k-pop fans*

[koganbot]

Previous link for that KARA track (편지할께요, Eng title = I Will Write You A Letter) is down, so here's another:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW2jckVrmvo

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I quite like this. Maybe just because it's Korean... the aesthetics are indie, but I hear a distinctively Asian melody. I really have no way of describing it in music theory terms or any other way, other than that it's the kind of melody I expect to hear from melodic J-Rock bands, softened.

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actually "j-rock-ish":

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