Frank Kogan

I know I'm preaching to.. the opposite of a choir here, but I'm moved by BoA's new Japanese single, marking her 10th anniversary as a recording artist



admittedly I'm also moved if she tweets her dinner plans for the day - I find her to be captivating in every way, and she's written some pretty heartbreaking, though not self-pitying, stuff about the celeb life, and even if this isn't about that, and I don't know who's written it, and the lyrics really aren't anything special so I doubt it's her, I can't help but draw parallels.

She's one of three judges on an interestingly ambitious new talent show (K-Pop Star) in Korea, by the way. The format is familiar but the judges and prizes aren't: It's BoA, CEO YG and CEO JYP. BoA represents SM, SM lacking a charismatic CEO and her also being a shareholder. The winner can, according to PR, choose which agency to join. Anyway it's interesting because she hates being on talk shows, variety shows and interviews, and almost never does TV in general, and certainly the irony of her as the proto-Hallyu-idol with her media-shy personality has added some interesting undertones to her art, and I'm very bad at not being influenced by that, I'm deeply sentimental, I think. But she looks more confident in this role, having watched the first episode, she doesn't have to talk about herself.

The point is, she recently tweeted "I feel alone even though I meet people all the time" and that kind of (cliché?) stuff moves me, as well, when I see her standing alone here, and how that's supposed to commemorate her 'milestone'.. and does that outfit look just a little bit like Judy Garland's in "A Star Is Born"?

It's a simple song that threatens to become "Imagine" at one point, but it works for me. The fact that this block of text is bigger than the embedded video speaks, I think, volumes about how bad an idea it is for me to push this particular kind of favorite on others, and how many pieces fit together for me to care enough about the song to listen to it until I like it, and I usually don't push these songs, and that goes for ballads in general, ballads with nothing in particular that's easily identifiable as being different from any other ballad - I may make a small effort, but move on quickly because they all get shrugs or silence in return from my surroundings.