Preview of T-ara posts to come
Jul. 8th, 2012 10:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotNever got around to answering ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
arbitrary_greay's comment over on the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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.
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.
Re: Crayon Pop
Date: 2012-08-30 07:09 pm (UTC)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.