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Coming To Terms With Ballads (Kim Bo Kyung and Barbara)
I thought that listening to huge gobs of Korean music would help me finally come to terms with ballads, since about a third of the music out of South Korea is not just ballads but is specifically in the genre "ballad" (as opposed to e.g. someone in r&b who happens to be doing a ballad). But what happened is that I realized I couldn't listen to everything. And as songs labeled "Ballad" and "OST" (most of the latter being ballads) tended to go in on ear and out the other anyway, those were the ones that got set aside.
About one in twenty ballads I hear I really like, and I wouldn't say I dislike the rest so much as I don't react and I barely differentiate one from the other. I couldn't tell you what's specifically different about the 5 percent I do like. I just get hit by something all of a sudden. So here's one I listened to by mistake and I love it.
Barbara had a so-so album out earlier this year, Neo Beat Generation, which was breathy and stylized, as you'd expect from the title, the "Neo"–ness putting a screen between me and it. Whereas "꿈..그보다 아픈," while being just as musically audacious and self-conscious, rips through emotionally: held slow and impressively controlled but ready to let loose, which of course it does. Yet lots of songs do the same, so I don't know why this one succeeded in being special.
And here's Kim Bo Kyung's "아파," variously translated as "Sick" and "Hurt" and "It Hurts," and it's more familiar, a power ballad, rises and wails, full cataract, all engines running.
From what I can tell, she's a former talent-show contestant who flourished by singing "Because Of You" and "Hotel California," though there seem to be several different Kim Bo Kyungs in Korean entertainment, as well as a footballer.
The quality of her records is scattershot, but "Suddenly" from earlier this year is good, very much along the lines of "아파."
About one in twenty ballads I hear I really like, and I wouldn't say I dislike the rest so much as I don't react and I barely differentiate one from the other. I couldn't tell you what's specifically different about the 5 percent I do like. I just get hit by something all of a sudden. So here's one I listened to by mistake and I love it.
Barbara had a so-so album out earlier this year, Neo Beat Generation, which was breathy and stylized, as you'd expect from the title, the "Neo"–ness putting a screen between me and it. Whereas "꿈..그보다 아픈," while being just as musically audacious and self-conscious, rips through emotionally: held slow and impressively controlled but ready to let loose, which of course it does. Yet lots of songs do the same, so I don't know why this one succeeded in being special.
And here's Kim Bo Kyung's "아파," variously translated as "Sick" and "Hurt" and "It Hurts," and it's more familiar, a power ballad, rises and wails, full cataract, all engines running.
From what I can tell, she's a former talent-show contestant who flourished by singing "Because Of You" and "Hotel California," though there seem to be several different Kim Bo Kyungs in Korean entertainment, as well as a footballer.
The quality of her records is scattershot, but "Suddenly" from earlier this year is good, very much along the lines of "아파."
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Kyun-woo: They have to kiss in the end.
The Girl: This isn't a melodrama. It's an action movie.
Kyun-woo: You don't know movies. Koreans like melodramas.
The Girl: Why?
Kyun-woo: Know what novel touched us when we were teenagers? 'Shower' by Hwang Sun-won. It shaped our people's sensibility in their teens. Koreans like sad movies all because of 'Shower.'
The Girl: 'Shower'? What's sad about it?
Kyun-woo: It's sad when she asked to be buried in the clothes reminiscent of her love. I couldn't sleep for one week.
The Girl: The ending sucks. Gotta change it.
Applies to the music as well I s'pose. Pretty sure I like a few more (k-)ballad-ballads than you, but have a similar problem defining the requirements. Generally, the problem is that their idea of dynamics and the pitch for their emotional investment is the most annoying giant wailing climaxes, acceptable if well-deserved, not when finishing off a flat melody-less black hole of a song.
The ones I like, I think, are ones with a sense of melody and a sensitive touch. Sometimes I like the artist and will listen to a ballad enough times so that I'll like it(*1). Feels like I fall more easily for cheap tricks when it comes to ballads, familiar chord progressions, instant mood-setters. I generally like ballads, which says a lot about how bad some of the bad ones are for me to hate.
(*1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxcD_kMzsVk
Melodic, and enjoyable because his voice is so impossibly smooth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyp-BBD_aAM
Amazingly dark power ballad:
(At first, it's the men: They trick you, don't mean those sweet words. Then the twist: She never meant it either, no one loves, there is no love, nowhere.)
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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.
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