Hyori & Girls

[koganbot]

Lee Hyori: Lee Hyori's Monochrome is the opposite of monochrome, with Hyori applying her gently authoritative style to all sorts of the last century's dance music (incl. country pop and western swing!). Strangely, I'm not hit with a lot of feeling — until the last four songs. That's only on one listen. Maybe the album simply takes a number of tracks before it penetrates, and when I go back to the start, the thing in its entirety will drive through me. In the meantime, "Miss Korea," track two, is an excellent lark (the lyrics as translated over at pop!gasa disputing the larkiness that the sound asserts), and emotion and discontent are at their deepest on track 12, the cheerfully titled "Show Show Show" [UPDATE: which turns out to be a rewrite and rearrangement of (and vast improvement on) Monrose's "No No No," with new lyrics by Hyori (see comments for Monrose embed)].

Watch on YouTube

The lyrics throughout Monochrome convey a consistent uneasiness. A lot is going on, though I don't know how much of it I'll reach.

Girls' Generation: Imagine "Land Of A Thousand Dances" in both its doop-doop and na-na-na-na-na versions done as beach-blanket bubblegum. What you've imagined is probably better than SNSD's new Japanese single, "Love & Girls," and I think arbitrary_greay and acts of verbosity are right to take the single, especially its video, to task for laziness and complacency and general unimpressiveness. But I haven't been all that impressed recently with Girls' Generation when they're being impressive, and I actually find "Love & Girls" viable, hummable, groovable. As actsofverbosity points out, it falls way short of Wonder Girls' similar "Like This." But then, "Like This" was last year's great summer groove,* and a pretty good summer groove like "Love & Girls" is, you know, pretty good. (Here's a link, though I expect Nayutawave will have it killed before you get a chance to click it.)

UPDATE: I've been dropping by every now and then, and switching out the "Love & Girls" video link whenever YouTube takes down the one I've already linked. In the meantime, here's where someone's ripped the song without PV; maybe it'll stay put a little longer. [UPDATING THE UPDATE: Well, this link is down now, but SM Town itself has now put forth the Japanese PV and it's in the link above and will presumably stay awhile.]

*Even if "Gangnam Style" was what hit the super-quadruple-lotto.

Comments

[askbask.livejournal.com]

I'm super impressed with Hyori. Miss Korea, which was a kind of buzz single, debuted at #1 on Gaon with the biggest sales of the year for a female artist. Bad Girl debuts at #1 this week.

Is that laudable in itself? Yes! I had no idea what she'd do for her comeback. In hindsight this is the only logical thing to do. But before this, there was no real precedent for Hyori being Hyori to this extent through her music. Her biggest hit is k-pop in a nutshell and not really to be repeated. Her last album was lead by a super charged but relatively forgettable dance track. There was genuine fear that her newfound love of the guitar would mean heartfelt acoustic ballad nothingness.

I mean she always delivers on other stages. On twitter, provoking discussion or just joking for the sake of it, or on variety shows, where she's showing up again this week in various guest spots, as super quick as always, like she hasn't been away for way too long since the whole sad end of her last campaign.

So I was thinking one of two, boring or anonymous. Instead she chooses to be good. The singles are funny, the lyrics take some jabs at society, she's sexy and sassy, all the good things about her. They're not my favorite songs of the year but they're good and they're fully her. Not expected, and I must reflect on that. But I think she had a difficult job navigating her way back onto the top of charts and she did it in this way. It's a good development in her career.

And I haven't given the full album a spin yet.

[askbask.livejournal.com]

Oh and I quite like Love&Girls, in fact I think it's their best original JP single. And best video, not a great achievement admittedly. I go back and forth on their singles - the latest years none of them have really held any longevity for me except I Got A Boy, which I truly enjoy hearing everytime it's played in public here.

[koganbot]

Just discovered that the music to Hyori's "Bad Girls" was written by your compatriots Dsign Music, as of course was SNSD's "I Got A Boy," which you also mentioned (as was my favorite ChoColat track, "I Like It," as was SNSD's "Tell Me Your Wish (Genie)"). I definitely need to explore Dsign music's output further. Hyori herself wrote the lyrics to "Bad Girls" (and to the majority of tracks on Monochrome).

My fave "Show Show Show" turns out to be a rewrite and rearrangement of (and vast improvement on) Monrose's "No No No," with Hyori penning new lyrics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K4y_51qNvY
Music is by Belgians Raph Schillebeeckx and Sanne Putseys (a.k.a. Selah Sue).

[koganbot]

Most of the album's music seems to be by people with European surnames, though Hyori herself wrote "Miss Korea."

[koganbot]

Double check: only one member of Dsign is on the credits of "I Got A Boy," Anne Judith Wik (four writers total). But Dsign are well-represented on the three other tracks I attribute to them.

Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Really liking this album. Immediately clicked with the sillier opening tracks ("Holly Jolly Bus" is like something stuck into a deep cut on an Archies record!) -- and immediately pegged track two ("Miss Korea") as ironic, though the social commentary I'm imagining in the delivery seems more interesting than the translated lyrics. I do like "I don’t want to hang on and cry over something so little / Like a springtime illusion that’ll disappear after I wake up."

This seems far more "singer-songwritery" to me -- in the sense of someone like Jewel or Liz Phair going teenpop and playing with styles (the sunshine pop and country tunes feel very pastichey, less integrated into a bigger pop sound), as compared to a girl/pop grouper going solo (Rachel Stevens, say). Any merit to this suspicion? Seems like her own group (Fin.K.L) was pretty early in the current teenpop life cycle and she's been solo since the early 00s. Would love a primer on the general timeline of that life cycle, btw, since from cursory research there seems to be a parallel (timewise) to the American teenpop boom.

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Seem to have glossed past you saying that Hyori wrote "Miss Korea." My first thought on that one was "Aimee Mann."

Re: Lee Hyori

[koganbot]

My research probably isn't a whole lot better than yours (I'll see if I can get Mat and Sabina to fill you in better). I'd say that the mid to late '90s is when K-pop was becoming routinized as a business, the agency system coming to dominate through SM Entertainment, though that wasn't Fin.K.L's label. The music was and still is pretty restless, however. The teenpop comparison is only half-apt, in that there wasn't some other regular pop that K-pop was breaking off of. K-pop was the basic pop, though its audience included a lot of teens and probably pre-teens too. But the big group H.O.T. were getting videos banned and were engaging in controversial subject matter (and throwing thrash rock into their pop-r&b-hip-hop mix) while still being massive teenybopper faves.

I don't know much Fin.K.L. (and have been meh on the little I've heard), but the first Hyori solo singles a decade ago seemed kinda Jam & Lewis, forceful r&b/pop, Hyori a sexual presence walking/prancing through various 'hoods. And for Korea I think the sexiness, normal by American standards, was something of a breakthrough. So I get the feeling that Hyori established herself as a sexual but grownup presence, and has been a star all through, though with a glitch when one of her writers plagiarized a bunch of melodies several years ago and got caught. But my uninformed impression is that (a) she's a very effective, appealing, confident star, a TV as well as song and video presence, and (b) she is a questioning, not necessarily confident person and she works that restlessness and uneasiness into her work, too. That may sound paradoxical but it makes perfect sense to me.

Re: Lee Hyori

[koganbot]

"sexiness... was something of a breakthrough"

Which isn't to say that Seo Taiji & Boys, H.O.T., S.E.S., etc. weren't massively sexy, just that Hyori was making a point of showing a lot of skin and I guess was having more of a come-on (though my knowledge of the videos that preceded hers is so limited that I might be all wrong about Hyori being a breakthrough here; just going on what I've read, and all the commenters on YouTube etc. who accuse HyunA of copying Hyori by being all sexual, which is typically dumb commentary, but does tell me that Hyori is considered some kind of template/progenitor).

As for the teenpop thing: I don't think of the K-pop idol groups as being specifically teenpop any more than Thriller or Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" were specifically teenpop (they sold to the general pop audience, not just to the lil uns). But of course Michael Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe were sources for a lot of the Euro-American teenpop starting in the mid '90s through the early '00s (when in the USA the teenrock confessional began competing with that sort of teenpop for teen attention). And of course, Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe are big sources for the K-pop idol groups, too. But that doesn't make the idol groups specifically teenpop. Just pop.

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Contrary to the last however many years, when I used teenpop above I really meant something more like "A-pop" -- the TRL/adult contempo/teenpop confluence. At that time, there was teenybopper-only stuff on Radio Disney, but there was plenty of teenybopper-plus-general-audience stuff, too. ("I Want It That Way," IIRC, was as much an adult contemporary masterpiece as a Backstreet Boys hit -- Max Martin won a bunch of legit songwriting awards for it, and that's to say nothing of strands of country, R&B, rap, novelty music etc. etc. that were intersecting.)

And maybe Michael Jackson and Bell Biv DeVoe inhabit a similar territory. In fact, the nich-i-ification of teenpop away from "A-pop" is probably a relatively recent phenomenon. My understanding of teenybopper music from most eras, from Paul Anka through the Backstreet Boys (say) is that it has an uneven and intersecting relationship with the rest of the pop landscape. Maybe the niche-ing of teenpop is heading back via performers like Taylor Swift, but I still see it as more of a niche interest in the U.S. than in (say) Korea. (Or maybe I'm way off here.)

Re: Lee Hyori

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

By "heading back" I mean "moving back toward a shared pop space" via Swift. But I'm not sure about that.

I became a problem child

[koganbot]

Lee Hyori about her stardom and her self-esteem issues:

http://www.allkpop.com/article/2013/06/lee-hyori-tears-up-as-she-talks-about-the-hardships-she-faced-during-her-career

"I want to tell everyone, 'You're perfectly fine right now'. No one told me that."

(h/t Mat)