E.via (artist of the year, 2010)
Jun. 12th, 2011 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotFor the many people* who ask me "Why Korea?" my answer is love. Yes, and there are plenty of other answers too, one being that people who know more than I do come to my lj and talk to me about K-pop, providing sociability and mindwork, and another being that K-pop is creating a hip-hop, r&b, dance-pop amalgam far better than the Billboard Hot 100's, and so on and so forth. But there's always got to be love. With rock there was Jagger**, with glitter the Dolls, with punk the Stooges, with disco Donna, with hip-hop Spoonie Gee, with freestyle Debbie Deb (both the real Debbie Deb and the imposter), with hair-metal Axl, with teenpop Ashlee, etc.***
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
E.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.
In this instance****, though, especially given the cultural distance, my not knowing Korea or Korean, I really can't say what's going on; this has inspired me to actually read some books about Korea. Not that what I learn will tell me what I want to know here, which is whether the E.via I've fallen in love with, whom I basically constructed in my mind out of scraps and song bits*****, has anything to do with any kind of reality. Did the Jagger? Pretty much everyone on my love list above has got some Jagger in her or him, or has me projecting the Jagger, anyway, Jagger Jagger burning bright, a combination of Jagger and Miss Lonely, my believing that the world is continually picking up the baton that the Stones and Dylan dropped, and dropping and picking up again.
E.via is from outside the idol factories, a rapper w/ supposedly salacious lyrics (though translations seem pretty tame to me) trying to break out of the underground; she's gonna out-cute the pop cutie-pies while still doing speed-rap and sex; meanwhile, my eyes or ears or my imagination tell me that her attitude towards cute is like Ray Davies' towards sunny afternoons or Mick Jagger's towards hearts of stone: she doesn't believe in it but she'll do it better than you or anybody else, just to show you. That's who I want her to be, though Sabina thinks E.via is just another ambitious pop girl who hasn't yet made it big, equivalent to someone like Christina Milian in the U.S.
In the video for "Hey!," E.via's first single, E.via comes on in schoolgirl dress, running parodies of little idol-girl-pop poses in quick succession; then her homies enter, sneering, and she goes into the tough rap proper, none of this pop nonsense.
But then for her next single, "Shake!" (see up top), here she is again, cute as a button, yelling instructions through a megaphone to gyrating women****** while the camera ogles their rear-ends and a disembodied butt logo bounces upscreen and down like the bouncing ball on "Name That Tune." (Korean TV refused to play the video.) I see this as impishly sarcastic, E.via critiquing her sexiness while having it too. But to put this in perspective, idol group Miss A use a pair of disembodied legs (shape of an A) in hose and heels as their logo, straightforward, no sarcasm or scare quotes that I can detect. And HyunA of 4minute recently did a spread-leg to the floor pµssy-pump dance in introducing "Mirror Mirror" to the viewing public, which caused an Internet uproar since after all children watch TV, and the network told the group don't do that on our show anymore or else we won't let you return. So maybe E.via is just another pop girl vying for attention in the game of shock and withdraw and shock again in a country that's gone from rural to urban and from agricultural to high-tech juggernaut in 10 seconds. But in E.via I'm imagining a critical eye, a Jagger mind, a quick hand to yank the rug and make us unsure of our footing.
Don't know the K-pop relation to J-pop; the two don't sound similar, to my uneducated ears. J-pop is fractured power pop rather than K-pop's athletic r&b. But surely "Pick Up! U!" is meant as a Japan reference and is to be heard also as "Pikachu."
*Well, no one's actually asked, but if they had, this'd be how I'd have responded.
**So hatred and fear mixed in with the love.
***The love of course is never limited to the performer. It's also about the world, the reflection, the brawl, people grasping the music with minds and hands. One of my great YouTube moments last year was discovering a Chilean teenager teaching herself to rap fast in Korean to the salsa-inflected "Shake!" and then watching her in her next video get with her girlfriends and dance and shake and rap onstage to it, turbocharging her way through.
****As for the year 2010, up there in parentheses, I meant to finish posting my year-end wrap-ups by mid-January, but you know how that goes. My goal now is to finish them by July 1.
*****Counting "Hey!" and "Oppa, Can I Do It" as the same song, she's basically got three significant songs, though with scads of remixes, alternate versions, guest artist A here, B and C there, D, E, F, G etc., instrumental versions, great dreamy little filler bits (like the one at the start of the "Hey!" vid), skits, and the usual second-rate ballad, plus a couple other actual pretty good songs buried in there, 36 tracks in all on four EPs.
******Who seem to have been filmed dancing to a different song altogether.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:20 am (UTC)Anyway, I'm still parsing some K-pop recently delivered unto me and have thoughts about it, especially now that I've been thinking a bit about how late 90's/early 00's teenpop was very much in conversation with hip-hop in rhythm and dare I say swagger in ways I feel like I once knew and then forgot, then remembered then forgot again and now re-remembered (or something).
But listening to some of the K-pop stuff, I'm struck by how it feels very much of this time, but as though it followed through a parallel history from the late-90's, where the promise that you could have your swagger and your sweetness and that these two things were not only incompatible but actively warped together in strange and beautiful ways...that seemed very much alive in 90's/early-00's pop and was (maybe?) cut down a bit by sober futurism with a different sense of humor (but a sense of humor nonetheless). I find much recent hip-hop to be oddly humorless given how fucking stupid (not a criticism per se) it is.
Anyway, the connotations I get biggest are something like: "what if Celine Dion and crunk had the same level of respect to a musician trying to make it in 2011?" But I haven't listened enough yet to articulate why this little idea keeps popping in my head.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-15 04:49 am (UTC)Btw, the performer I'm definitely getting a Cassie feeling from these days is Dev; she's bringing a Cassie feel to Ke$ha party skank vibe. (I could imagine Lex blowing a gasket if he were to read that sentence. But my guess is that Lex'll be down with Dev, and get what I mean by the Cassie comparison: a massively sexy and slightly imperious sense of absence in both of them, despite Dev's club-urchin aura.)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 12:59 pm (UTC)She tends to get classified as "rap," and I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that commercial success as a rap solo artist doesn't follow the trainee route. (As opposed to being a rapper in a girl group or boyband.)
Btw, to switch the subject to IU, my impression of IU - and this is an impression I've gotten from you - is that though she's on a major she's also taken her fate into her own hands, maybe even with the encouragement of her label. That is, she's such a broad talent that the label isn't set on locking her into a particular image or style, since they're getting a better payoff by trying a whole lot of the things she wants to try. I'm saying all this in ignorance of the actual situation: I'm just assuming that her live-girl-with-guitar efforts a couple of years ago superseded her actual record releases and videos at that time in establishing who she is and what she's capable of.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 02:21 pm (UTC)I don't know that trainee-ing for a studio is the only route to non-balladry stardom*, but it's close. This is one of the things I've bemoaned about k-pop - the lack of different artist types among the real big commercial stars. Not about the sounds and the music and the ideas, but where they come from.
I've brought up some k-pop songwriter types lately and my excitement for their rise is not so much a longing for acoustic jamming as seeing different narratives leading to stardom. Many of them are a lot more popular than e.via. http://www.gaonchart.co.kr/main/section/search/list.gaon?Search_str=%EC%9D%B4%EB%B9%84%EC%95%84&x=0&y=0
* Indie band 10cm's "Americano" is one of the bigger hits of 2011, so other kinds of success stories exist, but I'm talking pop STAR, doing the pop tv shows, getting that fan base.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 05:24 pm (UTC)I don't know much about the labels and organization of the hip-hop scene. I just listen to the things that show up on my subscriptions, mainly. Many female mcs who never get on music shows like e.via does.
Supreme Team are pretty huge, regular supply of hits. MC Mong has some of the biggest #1 streaks of the past few years, his is more novelty, fun time rap (see "Circus").
There's LeeSSang, whose member Gary featured on Lee Hyori's 'Swing'.
Tiger JK's African American/Korean wife Tasha is one of the bigger female names http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgK9TzVq7b4#t=06m12s
I guess this does show that as hip-hop artist you have other ways to the top. Don't think any of these started out as idol trainees, but I don't know for sure. But JYP's got san-E and YG's got PSY, both hip-hop and not idols. PSY started out elsewhere but found a home and a huge hit with YG
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We've talked about DJ DOC. They created a bit of a row in the midst of the "I'm this kind of person" promotion for attacking the tv shows only showcasing pop idols.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-16 06:50 pm (UTC)Physical album sales from LOEN Entertainment, SM Entertainment, Sony Music Korea, Warner Music Korea, Universal Music, and Mnet Media are synthesized in the album chart. All music sales except physical sales is estimated by digital chart. The digital chart is the combination of the mobile chart and the online chart. The mobile chart estimates the best selling ringtones, while the online chart calculates downloads and bgm sales as well as streaming services. All charts are offered monthly and weekly. [emphasis added]
It's that first sentence that jumped out at me as making the chart particularly untrustworthy. I can't tell if the companies are doing the sales reporting themselves; but otherwise, why list them like that? Not that physical sales are dominant anymore, or albums, but how can you be trustworthy if you're getting your figures from the labels, not the retailers. Or course, retailers can accept payola and lie too, which is why Billboard started using Soundscan in the U.S. And any system can be gamed, and it's the big guys who are likely to win the gaming. My guess is that in several years Gaon will be closer to genuinely reliable. Of course illegal downloads totally skew the picture anyway, and that's not going to change; though maybe there's a reasonable way to estimate which genres get illegally downloaded more than others, and which sales patterns have stronger correlations to illegal downloads than others do. But it'll never really be scientifically possible to gauge a song's popularity with complete numerical accuracy.
Chuck Eddy
Date: 2011-06-17 05:17 pm (UTC)From global pieces that I edited when I worked at Billboard, I got the idea that that's how music sales are tallied in many, many countries around the world -- So, where physical product is concerned, what you're really seeing are shipments, not actual sales, and you're trusting that the shipment numbers record companies give you are reliable, when obviously the labels would have good reasons to artificially boost them. I don't know off hand whether Korea, specifically, adds up numbers that way, but I wouldn't be surprised. And if they do, they are hardly alone -- SoundScan's use in the U.S. is actually the exception to the rule.
Re: Chuck Eddy
Date: 2011-06-17 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-21 10:39 am (UTC)