No Tiers For The Creatures Of The Night, Part 1

[koganbot]

Over the last few months several groups from the commercial lower tiers of K-pop have been at least as exciting as the big names. Foremost among them is New.F.O, whose "Bounce" would be a candidate for my 2012 P&J had the single not come out in late November, eight days before my December 1 cutoff date. The vid poses the question, "Don't we wish we were alien spaceship masters like 2NE1?," and the synths give us laser rays to match; but the singing is Fat Cat times five, these kitties sticking high-pitched electropopsicles hard in our ear.

Watch on YouTube

Also recommended: ChoColat "I Like It," After School "Rambling Girls," Clazzi ft. Koti & Jubi "Sexy Doll," Sunny Hill "The Grasshopper Song."

Comments

[koganbot]

I notice that when New.F.O transliterate the roman letter "F" into Hangul, they make it two syllables: "에프" — which, thanks to the glory of revised romanization algorithms, transliterates back into western script as "e peu."

(Several months ago I opined that in, e.g., spelling a group name "MA I THI MA U SEU" instead of "MIGHTY MOUTH," the Korean Copyright Association's attempt to render its writers' credits in English wasn't being very successful. While "Ma i thi ma u seu" might be useful for a Korean speaker who wants to understand how to pronounce "Mighty Mouth" and for some reason doesn't have access to the Hangul version, it's not adequate for the purpose of a subsite the mission of which is to communicate its information to speakers of English. Presumably the transliteration was done mechanically/electronically without a human being actually eyeballing the entries to ensure that transliterations and translations actually make sense. Probably not in the Copyright Ass'n's budget. But a number of Korean groups take English names, and transliterating (rather than translating) those names from English to Hangul and then transliterating back to romanization produces comical but not very usable results. Fortunately, the site doesn't do this with any consistency; so, for example, for New.F.O's "Bounce" the title is listed as "Bounce" and the band name as "New F O." The songwriters are Ashtray, Park Chan Jae, and Yoon Yeo Hoon. Plugging "Ashtray" into their system, I see mainly credits for the acts Cloud 9 and Third Wave, whom I've not heard of. Ashtray and Yoon Yeo Hoon did collaborate on "Gya U Tung," a track by Girl's Day (Geol Seu De I) that Wikip translates as "Tilt My Head" (the online romanizers and Google Translate weren't of any help on this one). The writers' credits for these three are mostly recent. By the way, I do think Hangul spelling is a lot easier to make sense of than English spelling, Korean being less of a mongrel language (or its mongrelization being less recent, anyway), and the spelling system, imposed top-down about five centuries ago, designed to be rational.)

In any event, the English "New.F.O" is the group's chosen name, rather than "New.F.O" being a translation of a Korean name. The name stands for "New Five Order."

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I didn't pay any attention to this song when it came out, I have to admit. It's actually the project of the guy behind AllKpop, which started out like any fan site but is now big enough to support stuff like this (despite the fact that they're mostly just translating Korean tabloid articles).

[koganbot]

Who is the guy? Is he actually one of the writers or producers, is he an executive producer, or is he now running a talent agency/label? I'm assuming this isn't an isolated project.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

http://www.koreanbeacon.com/2011/08/22/kaswork-johnny-noh-of-6theory-allkpop/

His company 6theory is working with "EnterArts Global" which I assume is a Korean label of sorts. I don't think he's involved in music himself.