Wonder Girls' BE MY BABY over at the Jukebox

[koganbot]

Wonder Girls were rollin' and rockin' the Jukebox last Friday. I'm in the comments with a minor dissent, my main problem being that I keep hearing a motif from Miss A's "Bad Girl Good Girl" in "Be My Baby" (both songs are by JYP), which makes me want the latter to be "Bad Girl Good Girl." But it doesn't get there. "Bad Girl Good Girl" sticks, hurts, while this rolls nicely in double time with some early Motown melodicism. So this is really something quite different, and I may be underrating it.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

My favorite Wonder Girls track ever is "So Hot," and my favorite tracks on Wonder World are "Act Cool" and "Stop!" "Act Cool" reminds me of that goofy Ashlee Simpson song, "Hot Stuff," the one where she says she can move her leg up all the way.

Comments

[askbask.livejournal.com]

On the latest episode of ‘Strong Heart‘, Wonder Girls’ Ye Eun revealed that she wanted miss A‘s hit song “Bad Girl Good Girl” for the Wonder Girls.

She explained, “When I first heard miss A’s debut song, ‘Bad Girl Good Girl’, I loved it. I knew it would be a hit song so I asked our CEO J.Y. Park if we could sing it. He replied ‘No’, saying ‘Who among you girls can dance that sexy dance?’…I thought, ‘Well if we practiced we could…”.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

JYP's melodies for the songs that get promoted are all so firmly rooted in the tonic that almost all the ones written since "Nobody" sound like each other, with the same progression and minimal alterations made to avoid copying accusations. This is my favorite example. The only exception I can think of right now is miss A's "Breathe," and it's still following his melody habits, but it has its own flavor due to the reggaeton rhythm. 2PM's "I'll Be Back" also has short shifts away from the tonic, but in passing notes so that with casual listening it still sounds like all of the others.

[koganbot]

This is interesting, and I'll want to analyze his chord patterns, which I've never really done. But "same chord progressions" doesn't necessarily entail "sounds like the same melody" — which I suppose may not be exactly what's happening in "Be My Baby" and "Bad Girl Good Girl," but what I have in mind is the third and fourth lines of the chorus of "Be My Baby" (1:13 to 1:17 in the video) running close in tune and rhythm to the chorus of "Bad Girl Good Girl" (1:11 to 1:21 in particular).

I'd say that Chuck Berry's hits were more rigidly similar in chord pattern than JYP's, ditto for James Brown's stream of funk hits in the second half of the '60s, but I thought Berry and Brown did a good job of not making their tracks sound one like the other. (However, whole bunches of people would probably disagree with that assessment.)

Actually, "Be My Baby" sounds like too much of a pastiche, the verse and the chorus seeming to come from different eras. So the song doesn't sound similar enough to itself! (Not that that would always be a criticism; I'm perfectly capable of loving pastiches.)

I hope you keep posting here, since you're helping me listen better.

Rundown of almost every JYP -written single in the past three years

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

I probably spent an hour or so yesterday trying to figure exactly why JYP songs all sound the same to me, and I had to concede that they don't ALL have the same progression, and like you've said, progression isn't the same thing as sounding alike in melody either.

My new hypothesis is that JYP just really likes the third interval, both major and minor. "Nobody", "Again and Again", "I Hate You", "Heartbeat", and "Tired of Waiting" are based on the mi-fa-so third in minor key.(And were all written around the same time. See the 2PM trend?)
Without You" from the same era is still almost all tonic minor, but plays around with more of the scale. Still resolves on mi, though. WG's 2 Different Tears is based in the minor key do-re-mi third interval.
"Bad Girl Good Girl" starts with the major key do-re-mi, but then switches to a II chord and then doing a quick switch to the relative minor key, before resolving on the mi of the major key. So it's JYP's more creative chorus in a while, but those third intervals are still present to keep things familiar. "Breathe" is based in the major key do-re-mi, with a bit of the minor key mi-fa-so of the II chord. "Good Bye Baby" throws around both of the minor key do-re-mi and mi-fa-so third intervals. And I don't like 2PM enough to listen to their Japanese offerings.

All of this is just the chorus, though. The verse and prechorus are where his less lazy songwriting happens, and where he can make the same progression sound different. Too bad Kpop is obsessed with that hook, so there JYP sticks with what he knows works. As he's said that when he wrote "Again and Again" that he wanted that song for himself because it was so good.
But yeah, the verse and chorus to "Be My Baby" share the same tendencies as BGGG's chorus.(major key do-re-mi and jumps to II) That may be why the pre-chorus is spent mostly in II, and the rhythm styles of the verse and chorus are divorced, to try and distract from that.

Pastiche almost sounds like a qualifier for my favorite Jpop songs at this point.

All in all, it reminds me of how maybe half of The Four Seasons' hits sound like riffs off of "Sherry," which itself was already a very repetitive track.(chorus-chorus-prechorus-chorus-verse?(same melody as the chorus)-prechorus-chorus)

The entire genre of blues is patterned around the I-IV-V-I chord progression, so it makes sense that early rock 'n 'roll just having branched off from blues would also be pretty similar.

Re: Rundown of almost every JYP -written single in the past three years

[descriptivist.livejournal.com]

It's been a while since I studied music theory but I think 2PM's two JYP-penned Japanese singles fit neatly into your intervals hypothesis: there's "I'm Your Man" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGlJia9H9d8), where you can hear it right away, and "Take Off" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twN_c_Q8n6s), where the chorus is built around a bunch of intervals. Not sure if that's a do or a mi, though.

[descriptivist.livejournal.com]

To me it's "Be My Baby" sounds like "Good Bye Baby" sounds like "Bad Girl Good Girl", for all the reasons arbitrary_greay mentions, but I occasionally skip that intermediary aural processing step.