The Tracks Of My Tiers
Jun. 15th, 2013 12:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotMade a YouTube playlist of my favorite tracks from K-pop's lower commercial tiers.
In ascending order. As you can see, I like both it and that:
Leader'S "Hope" (2011). The song is called "Hope" but the sound is heartache 24/7. I left NYC several years before Hot 97 or whatever it was came in with a Latin freestyle format, but I can imagine this humid emotion emanating daily from car radios and bodegas on my block (I lived on the northern end of Mott Street, which was nominally still part of Little Italy, but the Italians had mostly moved to more well-to-do neighborhoods, being replaced by immigrants from the Dominican Republic).
D-Unit ft. Vasco "Stay Alive" (2013). Produced by Zico of Block B, this is a lot more natural than his own group ever was at creating a hip-hop idol sound, emphatic rapping with a backdrop that's half dreamy and half disorienting.
Chi Chi "Sexy Doll" (2012). A come-on that sounds at least as ominous as it is salacious.
Z.Hera "Peacock" (2013). Haven't yet discovered who wrote this, but it's someone with a far better understanding than I of Chopin or whomever, the track moving along towards inevitable bliss, while the singer uses the strain in her voice to suggest struggle and uneasiness. She just debuted, and I'm hoping for great things.
Clinah "So What If" (2011). Fractured power pop. It feels Japanese.
Tiny G "Minimanimo" (2013). I wonder if Bo Diddley had the least inkling in 1955 that he was setting the beat not just for buckets 'n' guts, but for sprites and nymphs.
Miss $ "Physical Or Emotional" (2012). Back to the dark Bodega wail. Miss $ had been a so-what r&b act for several years until they suddenly blossomed into passion.
Evol "Get Up" (2013). Get ur twisty little freak on, and take it to the disco.
GLAM "I Like That" (2013). Samples New York City sorrow, then pushes towards a joy most complicated.
Flashe "Drop It" (2012). A lot like "Bo Peep Bo Peep" in the way it teases and nags you.
New.F.O "Bounce" (2011). While the video apes 2NE1-style imperiousness, the band bubbles and bounces.
ChoColat "I Like It" (2011). Young Melanie wants it all, with a massive voice of promise and pain.
Crayon Pop "Bar Bar Bar" (2013). Perhaps they're lucky not to be stars. They get to spray everyone in their audience with water pistols.
E.via (now calling herself Tymee) "Pick Up! U!" (2010). The queen of the lower reaches, she can be anything from a severe art bitch to the cutest and quickest of the wild spirits. Here she gives us fractured power pop, fractured dance pop, fractured Poképop.
Fat Cat "My Love Bad Boy" (2011). Putatively cute and catchy, our heroine breaks her voice into scrapes, sparks, and splatters, and the sort of hooks that rip flesh.
Honorable mentions: Gangkiz "Honey Honey," A-Jax "Hot Game," MYNAME "Just That Little Thing," Blady "Spark Spark," Delight "Mega Yak," X-Cross "Crazy."
Except for the artist formerly known as E.via, I steered away from hip-hop as such, where moderate sales are considered pretty good (though obv. the hip-hop influence is all over this list). And I didn't count trot, otherwise LPG would definitely be here. Or a jazz-blues singer like Woo Hye Mi ("Maria"), whom I discovered shooting flames on The Voice, or a jazzy balladeer like Barbara ("꿈..그보다 아픈 사랑"). And I don't know if we should consider middling sellers like Nine Muses ("Figaro") or Block B ("Halo") or RaNia ("Masquerade") as lower tier or not, but I left them off, and left off Jewelry ("Look At Me" [inst.]), who once had a number one hit.
Other than guest rapper Vasco, we didn't get male vocals until the honorable mentions. It's not that women singers have more talent than men, but the zeitgeist and arrangements seem to be working to their advantage, while guys struggle to find a voice that fits.
Unhappily for the YouTube playlist, the Fat Cat performance I wanted had been deleted from YouTube (fortunately not before someone ripped it for Youku), so for that playlist I had to go with a different performance from Fat Cat, better sound fidelity but not as immediately vibrant, and shot several weeks after the camera people became afraid to close in on her ticking tush.
Supplemental reading: In early 2012 I started a "No Tiers For The Creatures Of The Night" tag on my lj - though you can see that some of this goes back earlier. I only chose one track per group; but I urge you to listen further, especially to D-Unit, Chi Chi, Miss $, ChoColat, and of course Tymee, the artist formerly known as E.via.
I crossposted this on ILM's K-pop 2013.
In ascending order. As you can see, I like both it and that:
Leader'S "Hope" (2011). The song is called "Hope" but the sound is heartache 24/7. I left NYC several years before Hot 97 or whatever it was came in with a Latin freestyle format, but I can imagine this humid emotion emanating daily from car radios and bodegas on my block (I lived on the northern end of Mott Street, which was nominally still part of Little Italy, but the Italians had mostly moved to more well-to-do neighborhoods, being replaced by immigrants from the Dominican Republic).
D-Unit ft. Vasco "Stay Alive" (2013). Produced by Zico of Block B, this is a lot more natural than his own group ever was at creating a hip-hop idol sound, emphatic rapping with a backdrop that's half dreamy and half disorienting.
Chi Chi "Sexy Doll" (2012). A come-on that sounds at least as ominous as it is salacious.
Z.Hera "Peacock" (2013). Haven't yet discovered who wrote this, but it's someone with a far better understanding than I of Chopin or whomever, the track moving along towards inevitable bliss, while the singer uses the strain in her voice to suggest struggle and uneasiness. She just debuted, and I'm hoping for great things.
Clinah "So What If" (2011). Fractured power pop. It feels Japanese.
Tiny G "Minimanimo" (2013). I wonder if Bo Diddley had the least inkling in 1955 that he was setting the beat not just for buckets 'n' guts, but for sprites and nymphs.
Miss $ "Physical Or Emotional" (2012). Back to the dark Bodega wail. Miss $ had been a so-what r&b act for several years until they suddenly blossomed into passion.
Evol "Get Up" (2013). Get ur twisty little freak on, and take it to the disco.
GLAM "I Like That" (2013). Samples New York City sorrow, then pushes towards a joy most complicated.
Flashe "Drop It" (2012). A lot like "Bo Peep Bo Peep" in the way it teases and nags you.
New.F.O "Bounce" (2011). While the video apes 2NE1-style imperiousness, the band bubbles and bounces.
ChoColat "I Like It" (2011). Young Melanie wants it all, with a massive voice of promise and pain.
Crayon Pop "Bar Bar Bar" (2013). Perhaps they're lucky not to be stars. They get to spray everyone in their audience with water pistols.
E.via (now calling herself Tymee) "Pick Up! U!" (2010). The queen of the lower reaches, she can be anything from a severe art bitch to the cutest and quickest of the wild spirits. Here she gives us fractured power pop, fractured dance pop, fractured Poképop.
Fat Cat "My Love Bad Boy" (2011). Putatively cute and catchy, our heroine breaks her voice into scrapes, sparks, and splatters, and the sort of hooks that rip flesh.
Honorable mentions: Gangkiz "Honey Honey," A-Jax "Hot Game," MYNAME "Just That Little Thing," Blady "Spark Spark," Delight "Mega Yak," X-Cross "Crazy."
Except for the artist formerly known as E.via, I steered away from hip-hop as such, where moderate sales are considered pretty good (though obv. the hip-hop influence is all over this list). And I didn't count trot, otherwise LPG would definitely be here. Or a jazz-blues singer like Woo Hye Mi ("Maria"), whom I discovered shooting flames on The Voice, or a jazzy balladeer like Barbara ("꿈..그보다 아픈 사랑"). And I don't know if we should consider middling sellers like Nine Muses ("Figaro") or Block B ("Halo") or RaNia ("Masquerade") as lower tier or not, but I left them off, and left off Jewelry ("Look At Me" [inst.]), who once had a number one hit.
Other than guest rapper Vasco, we didn't get male vocals until the honorable mentions. It's not that women singers have more talent than men, but the zeitgeist and arrangements seem to be working to their advantage, while guys struggle to find a voice that fits.
Unhappily for the YouTube playlist, the Fat Cat performance I wanted had been deleted from YouTube (fortunately not before someone ripped it for Youku), so for that playlist I had to go with a different performance from Fat Cat, better sound fidelity but not as immediately vibrant, and shot several weeks after the camera people became afraid to close in on her ticking tush.
Supplemental reading: In early 2012 I started a "No Tiers For The Creatures Of The Night" tag on my lj - though you can see that some of this goes back earlier. I only chose one track per group; but I urge you to listen further, especially to D-Unit, Chi Chi, Miss $, ChoColat, and of course Tymee, the artist formerly known as E.via.
I crossposted this on ILM's K-pop 2013.
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no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 09:56 am (UTC)There are some more opinions on Chocolat. I wonder if they were all submitted by the same person.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 03:01 pm (UTC)*I'd also be curious to know the history of this common transliteration of the common Korean surname "이," since there's no "L" in "이"; should simply be "I" (pronounced "ee") or maybe "Yi" (still pronounced "Ee," I assume), which is how Revised Romanization and McCune-Reischauer do it, respectively. I can make guesses (none of which are complimentary to non–Asian Americans or non–Asian Brits), but I don't know.
no subject
Date: 2013-06-16 04:24 pm (UTC)Here's another Melanie mystery: her Instagram username is melmarielee.
mel
Date: 2013-06-18 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 08:02 am (UTC)I don't mean to be cavalier. Someone should probably pay someone else some money. But sometimes such concerns don't come into play until something's a hit, and "Stay Alive" never hit.
Reading the "One In The Chamba" thread, I see that there's a Wiz Khalifa track that used it on a mixtape. And mixtapes being mixtapes...
no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-08 04:17 pm (UTC)They were probably listening to Wiz, although apparently Vasco produced the song (or Zico? or both?) and he might have a bigger ear towards hip hop history than the D-Unit gang. So he could have listened to the Almighty RSO but who knows. What I'm curious to find out is whether they paid for the beat; I think that the K-pop world is quite exploitative when it comes to giving people their fair compensation, so it would come as a shock to me if they did. Now, I doubt Almighty RSO needs it (Benzino was part of the group and he certainly doesn't need cash) nor does the label.
It just rubs me the wrong way - the girls likely have no idea where the sounds come from. That's good and bad, but "One In The Chamba" is such a charged and historic song that it feels off when they rap on it. Like, I wouldn't be happy if 2NE1 used the "Fight The Power" instrumental. It would just seem like totally terrible appropriation. That's obviously ridiculous but this strikes the same chord (literally, even!) with me. Then again, I love how K-pop pillages from western music, so I don't have a particularly good reason why this time should be any different.
On a related note, there's a T-ara song that pretty much takes the entire beat from another song and I have to wonder if they gave the source any money. The T-ara track was a "hit" so you know they made plenty off of that. My gut tells me no, and I hate that I'll never find out.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-06 05:49 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH1SZjLiMMY
no subject
Date: 2019-08-06 05:57 am (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h23WgVYDbQ
(For some reason I accidentally linked to T-ara instead of Wiz Khalifa.)