Preview of T-ara posts to come

[koganbot]

Never got around to answering arbitrary_greay's comment over on the snsd_ffa Gangkiz thread regarding the T-ara concept and high production values. "T-ara concept" is the subject of one of my 500 future T-ara posts that are in the planning stage. But in brief, the T-ara concept can be summarized, "Words that rhyme, words that repeat, raps that fit sing-song, any rapper can sing, oeuvre interspersed with drip-drip ballads that are inexplicably good, Qri???, Jiyeon never emotes, they make it all sound easy." For that last, as far as production values go, their songs are well-produced but have an air of being tossed-off. In sound and song they're casual Tommy Rall as opposed to Miss A's heavily perspired Bob Fosse. So, there's nothing in T-ara's music that signifies "High Production Values" or "Musical Ambition," despite the actual care that actually goes into the music and the arrangements.

Vids are a different matter, starting with "Roly-Poly." They definitely flaunt the money being thrown at them. The "Roly-Poly" vid was a perfect confectioners concoction (manages to run lightly for ten minutes with no actual plot), "Cry Cry" was good boilerplate gangster melodrama, "Lovey-Dovey" was boilerplate rehash overlaid with tedious Godfather 3 type rumination scenes and mood shots, and "Day By Day" is a ridiculous collection of futuristic dystopian tropes that don't add up to a story. Might have been ridiculously great, anyway, but doesn't seem to fit the songs. (The two songs, "Day By Day" and "Don't Leave," have wide-screen spaghetti-western touches but are too piffling and light for the sweep of the video. I mean "piffling and light" as a high compliment here.) In "Roly-Poly," the song was perfect for the vid, and the overdramatic tracks "Cry Cry"/"We Were In Love" were right for the "Cry Cry" video melodrama. "Lovey-Dovey" was a complete mismatch between song and video, the club sequences being extraneous to the story. But overall I like that T-ara is willing to challenge SNSD and 2NE1 on the terrain of high ambition, but like even more that T-ara never shake their air of B-movie poverty-row opportunism. They'll never be the A list, but they'll often create better sound and vision.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I love (the cut version of) "Day by Day" so much. Their wispy vocals as Hyomin and new-member Dani (who is 14...) frolic in the fields with doves and bunnies; those same whispy "doo doo doos" as Jiyeon chases down and kills faceless male gangsters in corridors. AWESOME.

Also is it just me, or are there a lot of twins in Kpop? Jiyeon and her twin sister in 5dolls; DBSK's Junsu and his brother with a cameo in Tallentelegra; BAP's Bang Yong Guk's older twin brother who fronts for a rock band; SNSD's Jessica and F(x)'s Krystal who aren't technically twins but are reportedly very close. And then there's Boyfriend and Crayon Pop, newer groups with intact sets of twins aha. I wonder if this is something the entertainment companies look for, since groups score points with fans when the members are "close" (and "actual twins" is less dysfunctional than "codependent as *if* they were twins").

[koganbot]

Dani may be only 14, but she has special powers (though so far they don't include performing with the group).

To further foil my T-ara Voice Recognition Project, the vid for the dance ver. keeps cutting to various members sitting in a chair and lipsyncing each other's lines.

You mean Hwayoung, not Jiyeon (as the one whose twin sis is in 5dolls/Co-Ed School).

Jiyeon's hair is back to black.

Dara's brother is in MBLAQ, right? Not that they're twins.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Thunder was a last-minute addition to MBLAQ after the original choice dropped out right before they debuted. (I know this because my ex-roommate is a big big MBLAQ and Thunder fan.)

Day by Day dance ver. video is hilarious. If I was going to pick the very last T-ara song to give the constant-black-and-white-costume-changes-and-flashing-lights treatment, it would be this one. "Day by Day" is a relaxing song, or at least it sounds relaxing when you aren't paying close attention to the lyrics. I can't tell if it's laziness or if the director is screwing with us.

[koganbot]

Apparently T-ara videomakers rarely let the nature of the song curtail their imaginations. I won't say it won't always work, to bring heavy concepts to light music.

Crayon Pop

[koganbot]

Crayon Pop seem like naturally good dancers who've been given very simple dance moves. If they were American, I would assume on the basis of how this looks that they were aimed at the Disney or Nickelodeon audience. But I realize that in Korea that could be a misreading (yet "young audience" might well explain the simplicity of the dance moves: something for the tykes to imitate with ease).

Speaking of cultural misreadings, when I first heard Crayon Pop, without seeing them, I thought, "Hmmm, sounds like indie dance pop," that is, a detached, knowing version of cute. Not that teenyboppers and their mentors can't purvey a detached, knowing version of cute. But really, I wouldn't have been surprised to see bohos in their mid 20s.

Re: Crayon Pop

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, all the members of Crayon Pop are over twenty, so they're young women posing as teenyboppers. The oldest, Gun Mi, was born in 1988, so she's already considered twenty-five under the Korean age system (where you're one year old at birth and, IIRC, turn a year older every New Year). And lead vocal Way went/goes to Seoul Art College, which sounds as if it ought to be pretty boho. :)

So, yeah, I'm thinking they might be boho hipsters playing at being idols with a detached, knowing version of cute, or at least perhaps their managers are playing at making idol pop with a detached, knowing version of cute.

Re: Crayon Pop

[koganbot]

Well, I think one of my hypotheses here is that in Korea to dress and dance and sound like that doesn't necessarily signify as "teenybopper," and it's assumed that young and even not so young adults are part of the audience. Same would apply to "Girl's Day." A corollary hypothesis is that the U.S. is relatively rare in assuming that bubblegum is just for kids. (I guess I could call that the Trix Hypothesis.)

An alternate hypothesis is that they are understood to be going young and teenybopper in look but in K-pop that's a frequent move among idol performers and it doesn't lose you your late-teen and adult audience. This would be the Orange Caramel Hypothesis. (I still haven't quite processed Orange Caramel for being these leggy model types who incongruously dressed like they'd stepped out of a picture book for the tykes while playing trot rhythms. And then in After School they revert to behaving like Pussycat Dolls. Covering all the bases, I guess; their clothing has grown up a bit since they started.)

Here's the vid, again, YouTube having killed the previous embed:



Of course, they may well be bringing some boho "knowingness" to the proceedings too. But I'd guess that there's some K-pop "knowingness" that's already there to begin with. (I've put "knowingness" in quotation marks because I don't buy that it knows anything; displaying one's self-consciousness isn't the same as having insights into, like, childhood and such.)(When I was a kid I hated kids' TV, preferring Tarzan movies and war movies and the Marx Brothers and I Love Lucy.)

Re: Crayon Pop

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile allkpop breathlessly reports "Crayon Pop reveal they aren’t afraid to confront agency". The members confronted their manager to complain about how the company was treating them...and it just happens that the incident was witnessed by a television crew making a show called "Diary of Crayon Pop" for MBC Music. It sounds to me rather as if the show's producers staged the confrontation to attract attention, since injecting a dose of controversy probably helps if you're trying to promote a reality show about an obscure rookie idol group. And of course the T-ara affair has made the behaviour of entertainment companies a topical issue in Korea.

Speaking of which, the allkpop article is full of user comments saying that the Crayon Pop members are lazy and ungrateful and should work harder if they want to become famous, etc, etc. Kim Kwang Soo would heartily agree...

Re: Crayon Pop

[koganbot]

Ha! When I initially saw the sentence "Crayon Pop reveal they aren't afraid to confront agency," I interpreted the word "agency" in the cultural-studies sense. So I didn't think "talent agency" but rather (Merriam-Webster def'n 2): "the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power," as in "K-pop performers are not simply puppets, and K-pop fans are not passive receptacles, but rather exhibit a certain amount of agency (twisted little fucks though they be)." So I took the sentence to be saying that Crayon Pop were confronting the issue of agency. Which maybe they are.

I don't assume the show's producers had to stage the confrontation (though that's not impossible). A simpler explanation is that Chrome Entertainment (previously unknown to me) chose the members of Crayon Pop for demonstrating a certain amount of fire, and MBC has an eye for drama.

In November 2001, in the two weeks before Pink's Missundaztood was released, I was inundated with promo copy from Arista detailing all of the confrontations she'd had with label prexy L.A. Reid. ("The president of the label took me out to dinner to try and convince me to take etiquette classes, so I sat there and just ate with my hands.") I doubt that the confrontations were pre-planned, that Reid originally signed her with the understanding that she was going to demand a shift in direction and a choice of her own producer after her first LP. Rather, he eventually realized he wasn't going to win the argument (or, anyway, that winning wouldn't be worth it), and determined to make the argument a selling point.

Not that an agency or a TV producer wouldn't stage confrontations, but my guess is that in this instance they don't need to. Depends on the personalities.

Re: Crayon Pop

[koganbot]

By the way, here's some actual Korean indie dance pop, though it's not teenybopper. Pretty good. Could use a post of its own, but I won't have time today.

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Re: Crayon Pop

[davidfrazer.livejournal.com]

Oh, Neon Bunny! I bought Seoulight on iTunes, but it's disappeared from the UK iTunes store, so I don't expect Happy Ending to turn up any time soon.