Returning home with an empty heart...

[koganbot]

Unfootnoted text that I hope is never deleted from Wikipedia:

Soyeon fostered her dreams of becoming a star even before she could stand in front of a mirror. After getting into an arts high school, she became a trainee at a top name agency in her senior year. Every single day, she rehearsed to the point of sweating through three different t-shirts.

Six months before she was to debut with SNSD, she withdrew from the final line-up. After returning home with an empty heart, she spent the next year and a half in what she personally declared was the hardest moment of her life.

Her hardships didn't end there, though, as her grandmother and uncle — both avid supporters of her dream to become a star — met with a health crisis that eventually led to their deaths a year later.

Soyeon expressed, "Up until my life right now, the year and a half I spent after leaving Girls' Generation was the hardest point in my life. Not only my parents, but my entire family supported my dreams, especially my grandmother and uncle. But right after I had to give up my trainee life, they passed away in the same year. Both told me one thing: 'Become a singer.'"

She continued, "After the funerals, I dusted myself off and tried to find my determination to reach my dreams again. I clenched my jaw and said to myself, 'Let's try this one more time.'"

Coincidentally, Mnet Media released an article declaring that they were looking for one more member to complete their upcoming five member girl group. To Soyeon, it was a chance that she couldn't pass up. After overcoming her obstacles, she's not only shining in the music industry, but in broadcasting as well. She's headlined countless times for her witty remarks on variety shows like "100 Points out of 100".
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_So_Yeon

Soyeon is the one who starts singing at 0:28, and the song belongs to her more than to any other T-aran:

Watch on YouTube

Two versions of this, the ballad (which they do on the embedded Music Bank performance for the first 1:12*) and the dance. The ballad far outshines the dance; the latter is neither fish nor fowl, not bright enough for the careless-Oops!-style Britney it goes for, not dark enough for the pain the ballad achieves. Which doesn't make the dance version bad, mind you. (Thought the Jukebox fumbled this terribly, but most of them were only hearing the dance version. Still, the Wonder Girls' "Be My Baby," which they loved, is for me the indifferent pastiche they think this is.)

T-ara did a much better job being slavishly Britney a couple years ago:

Watch on YouTube

(In early December I wrote a post about the "Cry Cry" video but the computer ate it. Will redo one of these days.)

*Which is all that's here now: the vid I'd originally embedded was taken private and I can't find the whole performance anymore.

Comments

[koganbot]

Impressed with Jiyeon for playing while injured. (See her knee brace.) This was comeback week, and her presence was crucial.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I have no idea about the biographies of most K-poppers, but that's pretty interesting considering that Soyeon always struck me as "the one in T-ara who could conceivably have been in SNSD". I like this song much better than "Be My Baby", but I am a massive Max Martin stan.

I wouldn't mind seeing your "Cry Cry" video post, if you ever decide to retranscribe it. IMO it was as good as any other Korean gangster film I've seen, while requiring only 15 minutes of my time input instead of, say, 2 hours. XD

[christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)]

I prefer the dance version of this song actually but it still doesn't have the giddy quality that made me so obsessed with their "Absolute First Album" when I first heard it last June. With the exceptions of "Why Are You Being Like This" and maybe "Roly Poly", I just haven't fallen in love with their recent releases as much, at least not in comparison to the 2011 4minute and Kara records.

[koganbot]

Christophe, thanks for showing up again!

I lean towards early T-ara as well — "Like The First Time" is my absolute favorite, as well as being my T-ara favorite; I also really like "I Go Crazy Because Of You": giddy, poignant, yes — and like you I'd probably rate "Why Are You Being Like This?" as my favorite T-ara track over the last fourteen months. But "Cry Cry" embraces me in a different way, and I'm glad they tried it. 2011 was very necessary for them. Here's an analogy: I prefer the early Beatles' music to the later more self-consciously ambitious stuff, but I think the Beatles would have been false to simply keep going along the lines that they'd set up at the start; what began as a jolt of sound and passion would have grown stale, would have become a limitation, a refusal to explore the possibilities of music that they'd opened up. T-ara aren't (yet?) in position to be nearly as socially audacious as the Beatles were, but there's certainly a lot for T-ara to explore regarding what can be done in K-pop, in the video form and in live presentation as much as in the music. I hope to do a post on T-ara one of these days where I'll try to take these ideas further. They (the T-aran's themselves? Core Contents Media? certain producers, choreographers, videographers, clothes designers?) decided to make T-ara major, and by-and-large they succeeded in a way that didn't jettison what their bread-butter-n-sugar dance-pop did well before. I like that, where Brown Eyed Girls veered towards the incomprehensible, T-ara gave us gangster melodrama. Seemed to fit T-ara.

As sound I preferred the disco revival of Nine Muses' "Figaro" to T-ara's "Roly-Poly," but getting up and dancing "Roly-Poly" four or more times a week, T-ara just continuously bubbled and dazzled.

[christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)]

Sorry for the late reply to this thread. Since your message I downloaded the "Funky Town" mini-album and completely fell in love with both "Lovey Dovey" and "Cry Cry". It's crazy how the right mood and right context can really change how you hear a song. I now love both versions of "Cry Cry". I can't get over how seamlessly they melded the early Britney/Max Martin production with Abba melodies on the faster version. The song always makes me smile.

[koganbot]

Regarding your question on another thread, there's this.

[koganbot]

Have you heard Davichi & T-ara's "We Were In Love"? It's cut from the same cloth as the ballad version of "Cry Cry," though it's not as arresting, and neither Davichian sings as well as Soyeon or fits the song as well as Jiyeon and Hyomin. Minkyung does a good job rapping, as does Hwayoung on behalf of T-ara. I generally get impatient with the sincere, pained style of rapping that saturates K-pop and that Hwayoung and Minkyung do here, but by keeping it brief they keep it effective. (I intend one of these day to post about T-ara's raps, which usually avoid the standard style and instead are designed to match the mood of T-ara's upbeat songs. So of course I like them. The T-ara rap styles have no equivalent anywhere else in K-pop, at least from what I can tell.)

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[christophe andersen (from livejournal.com)]

"We Were in Love" is on my copy of "Funky Town" but I had no idea it was with another group. I think the song is ok. I don't skip it mostly because I like both raps and the melody is nice enough. It's a little labored of a song, though, and with a dull video.

I actually don't watch most of the videos so the names of the singers/rappers and who sings what parts are mostly unknown to me. When I do watch, I tend to prefer the live performances. I think it's been 7 months since I first heard any k-pop and the amount of music I've sought out and consumed in that time has been ridiculous. It's all a little hard to keep straight at this point...

[koganbot]

To tell you the truth, I've taken forever to be able to connect name to voice and name to face (I think I'm up to maybe half of SNSD), and with everybody changing hairstyles every three minutes I usually have to really concentrate. Then, finally, a face will click, and I'll always recognize that person. And then labor over recognizing someone else. I'm pretty bad IRL, too.

K-pop has managed to flip me, though; I'm paying way more attention to visuals. I talked about this the other day over on the SNSD Free For All. The live TV performances especially seem to have a lot at stake, despite the sometimes substandard singing.

[koganbot]

Here's the vid again for "We Were In Love":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ31sMmytHU