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koganbotThe music video proper for 2NE1's "I Am The Best" is out now.
Features medieval armor, large poodles, small kittens, restraints, studs, chainmail, suit jackets, vinyl blouses, funny hats, pyramids, trains, and gongs. The music is the little drummer boy sent through Marine training and given a tommy gun. Except it's also beautiful blobs of harmony and girl group dreaminess, as if the prettiness and the fierceness were one and the same. It's pretty fierce!
And it's the exact sort of thing that Korea is doing with American-based music that nonetheless has no equivalent in North America: aggression and beauty yoked together, hard rap coming on like it's the main meal and the melody but a condiment. A lot of fun. See them pushing the boys away in the "comeback" routine they did yesterday on TV:
They were just as tough in last year's even better "Try To Follow Me."
On this stuff 2NE1 have a hard-girl, take-no-shit-from-the-boys-or-anyone-else demeanor; but Park Bom, the melodic singer in the Misfits mesh, is just as capable of putting out deliriously sentimental sap, for instance, the recent "Don't Cry." And to contrast with that, she was introduced to the world back in 2006 when still a YG Entertainment "trainee," prior to being placed in 2NE1, as the juvenile delinquent shoplifter girl in Lee Hyori's "Anystar," an epic music video/mobile-phone commercial (literally, it was financed by Samsung).
Dara, the singer with the long face in the Lamborghini (or whatever it is), did "Kiss," a nice boy-girl stalk-and-withdraw flirtation video track, a couple of years ago.
Korea's dance-r&b combination seems way more assured and potent than the equivalent in Euro-America, though I guess it's all a big work in progress these days.
(We've been discussing "I Am The Best" and the new SNSD album back on a previous thread.)
Features medieval armor, large poodles, small kittens, restraints, studs, chainmail, suit jackets, vinyl blouses, funny hats, pyramids, trains, and gongs. The music is the little drummer boy sent through Marine training and given a tommy gun. Except it's also beautiful blobs of harmony and girl group dreaminess, as if the prettiness and the fierceness were one and the same. It's pretty fierce!
And it's the exact sort of thing that Korea is doing with American-based music that nonetheless has no equivalent in North America: aggression and beauty yoked together, hard rap coming on like it's the main meal and the melody but a condiment. A lot of fun. See them pushing the boys away in the "comeback" routine they did yesterday on TV:
They were just as tough in last year's even better "Try To Follow Me."
On this stuff 2NE1 have a hard-girl, take-no-shit-from-the-boys-or-anyone-else demeanor; but Park Bom, the melodic singer in the Misfits mesh, is just as capable of putting out deliriously sentimental sap, for instance, the recent "Don't Cry." And to contrast with that, she was introduced to the world back in 2006 when still a YG Entertainment "trainee," prior to being placed in 2NE1, as the juvenile delinquent shoplifter girl in Lee Hyori's "Anystar," an epic music video/mobile-phone commercial (literally, it was financed by Samsung).
Dara, the singer with the long face in the Lamborghini (or whatever it is), did "Kiss," a nice boy-girl stalk-and-withdraw flirtation video track, a couple of years ago.
Korea's dance-r&b combination seems way more assured and potent than the equivalent in Euro-America, though I guess it's all a big work in progress these days.
(We've been discussing "I Am The Best" and the new SNSD album back on a previous thread.)
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Date: 2011-06-29 08:20 pm (UTC)No spoilers, but I was struck by the fact that the series as a whole splits its focus 50/50 between streams of gendered concerns, as it were, running in parallel - here are the things women do, and have done to them; here are the things men do, and have done to them. Lymond, who has an ambiguous sexuality and whose deepest sympathies lie with women, is made subject to successes and failures on both sides of the fence. The issue of his emotional isolation becomes the central Gordian knot of the story, to the irritation of some readers who feel he warps the cast around him enough as it is. :P