koganbot | (Reply)

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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.