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T-ara's Weird Year
Okay, T-ara's really weird year was last year, but that was merely for what was being done to them in their lives. As for notes and singing and dancing and stuff, this year seems to be one tangent after another. Of course, "Number 9," their new Shinsadong Tiger single, is a return to top T-ara and resumes right where they left off with "Sexy Love" in September 2012. But my actual favorite T-ara product in 2013 has been most-inessential-member Qri's strange Bunny Style b-side in Japan, "Do We Do We," which sounds like perfect piffle from a previous dimly perceived galaxy of Italodisco. Here's a fan vid. [UPDATE: YouTube scotched the fan vid, so here's another one, using a Bunny Style still (ears are... I don't know, but it's not my world)[and that was scotched as well, so here's yet a third, ear-free).]
The only other track to hit me from the Bunny Style project (10 different releases with the same A-side and ten different B's) is "Maybe Maybe" from other officially inessential member Boram, the song trying to sound equally inessential, could do double duty as a commercial for air freshener. Without the apparent skill she outdoes Lim Kim and IU on the Ipanema tip. The rest of "Bunny Style" is as light and bright but far less engaging in its nothingness. (But I don't pretend to a feel for J-pop.)
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arbitrary_greay and askbask have you heard this?)
Next Japanese single, "Target," they're back to sounding like T-ara, smiley but also aching and insistent and obsessive, quite good, and the song flopped.
Returning to the Korean side of the East Sea, there's "Jeon Won Diary," which, as we've already discussed, does its job as a kick-ass dance tune but drowns out T-ara's character in the process. Meantime, T-ara get top billing for the multi-group "Painkiller" with Jiyeon hating herself to death in the video but appearing nowhere on the record, the only T-aran aboard being Soyeon. Music is meant to be sadly, unsettlingly rollicking and as such is on the money.
"Bikini" is T-ara doing a by-the-numbers fun-in-the-surf-and-sun number, damned if I know why given that they ruled the previous two summers with distinctly T-ara songs. Not that I expect the public to ever let them rule again; and anonymously joyful is fine I guess but they actually sound kinda drippy and droopy on it.
So, to "Number 9" and Shinsadong Tiger: he's once again risking one hook too many and using song parts that no longer seem to flow one into the other in the way melodies used to flow back in the Korean old days of two years ago, though maybe those parts'll seem inevitable in their order once they get ground into me over multiple hearings, as finally happened with "Volume Up" and "Sexy Love," in any event seem to fit K-pop's growing formal ferment.
Jiyeon abandons her uninflected breathiness for actual emoting, the brief beginning of which ("neo manhi nal utge haneun") reminds me of the strong cross-ocean ache in Pajama Party's and Brenda K. Starr's "Over And Over"**; the song's passion is on her shoulders even more than Eunjung's, and she carries it. Although for the long run I'm uneasy if this turns out to be a change in Jiyeon's role,*** this time it works in the song's general pitch of T-ara joy and anxiety. To top everything, Hyomin does a bleaty barky thing in a "rap" that once again, typically for T-ara, is more compelling than most real rappers' real raps.
But maybe the year's top T-ara story is Qri and Boram finding themselves in a carefreeness that no one would believe from the others.
*I'm not saying the dispareteness I hear in these three songs is deliberate. But (for instance) on all three I've yet to pick out a part that's unequivocally the chorus.
**It's hard for me to justify this connection, though, since Jiyeon's not singing the same notes; but I'm thinking of the melodic push when Pajama Party sings "love me" "move me" "tell me" "touch me" "tell me" "hold me," which also reminds me of the Dells on the title phrase "There Is" and the Four Seasons in the title phrase "Begging" — which isn't to say that Jiyeon's an emotional match for any of them, and as I say it's not typical Jiyeon. But anyhow: mandatorykoganbot freestyle evocation.
***Uneasy because I don't think she has the voice for it (she does the passion well here by turning the heat up a little while not getting in the way of the melody, but I don't think she could add it when required, or knock the daylights out of it at a climax), but also uneasy because with Soyeon, Hyomin, and Eunjung already emoting, T-ara don't need Jiyeon to do the passion thing — while they do need her to do Jiyeon. Of all my T-ara wonderments, and T-ara's wondrous mints, Jiyeon's effective uninflectedness is the most puzzling. I think of her as (accidentally or not) doing a social equivalent to what Billie Holiday did musically: Holiday imposed her own pace on songs, e.g. by taking a phrase or two to sing duple against a song's triple meter. Of course, Billie was a genius and Jiyeon is not. But Jiyeon creates a presence for herself by holding back. I wrote about this more extensively last year in "Wan For The Win," about her being a sonic space of paleness and clarity within a general T-ara hub-bub and how in early "Roly-Poly" live gigs she dominates an effervescent performance by not once cracking a smile. (I'll also refer you to Dave Hickey's great "Mitchum Gets Out Of Jail" essay in O.K. You Mugs, quoting Mitchum as to how as an actor you have to set your own pace in counter to the rest of what's going on: "The projector will be rolling, the cameras will be panning, the angle of the shots will be changing, and the distance of the shots will be changing, and all these things have their own tempo, so you have to have a tempo, too. If you sit or stand or talk the way you do at home, you look silly on the screen, incoherent. On the screen, you have to be purposive... So a lot of times, in a complicated scene, the best thing to do is to stand absolutely still, not moving a muscle. This would look very strange if you did it at the grocery store, but it looks okay on screen because the camera and the shots are moving around you."
In order of preference (thumb solidly up on 1 through 6, my feelings as yet unknown on "I Know The Feeling"):
1. "Do We Do We"
2. "Number 9"
3. "Target"
4. "Painkiller"
5. "Maybe Maybe"
6. "Deja-Vu" (on Treasure Box)
7. "I Know The Feeling" a.k.a. "Because I Know"
8. "Bunny Style" and the rest of the B-sides, which are subjects for further research, since I officially Don't Get It
9. The other two newbies on Treasure Box
10. "Hurt" and "Don't Marry" (on Again), which I haven't really listened to but seem merely okay, if "Don't Marry" is even that
11. "Bikini"
There's also Whatever else I forgot or that slipped by (there's always something), such as the unheard by me "Again 1977."
[Oh, and nowadays my new threads are being overrun by spam for the first week or so; don't let that discourage you; I clear the spam whenever I get the chance.]
The only other track to hit me from the Bunny Style project (10 different releases with the same A-side and ten different B's) is "Maybe Maybe" from other officially inessential member Boram, the song trying to sound equally inessential, could do double duty as a commercial for air freshener. Without the apparent skill she outdoes Lim Kim and IU on the Ipanema tip. The rest of "Bunny Style" is as light and bright but far less engaging in its nothingness. (But I don't pretend to a feel for J-pop.)
(Btw,
arbitrary_greay and askbask have you heard this?)Next Japanese single, "Target," they're back to sounding like T-ara, smiley but also aching and insistent and obsessive, quite good, and the song flopped.
Returning to the Korean side of the East Sea, there's "Jeon Won Diary," which, as we've already discussed, does its job as a kick-ass dance tune but drowns out T-ara's character in the process. Meantime, T-ara get top billing for the multi-group "Painkiller" with Jiyeon hating herself to death in the video but appearing nowhere on the record, the only T-aran aboard being Soyeon. Music is meant to be sadly, unsettlingly rollicking and as such is on the money.
"Bikini" is T-ara doing a by-the-numbers fun-in-the-surf-and-sun number, damned if I know why given that they ruled the previous two summers with distinctly T-ara songs. Not that I expect the public to ever let them rule again; and anonymously joyful is fine I guess but they actually sound kinda drippy and droopy on it.
So, to "Number 9" and Shinsadong Tiger: he's once again risking one hook too many and using song parts that no longer seem to flow one into the other in the way melodies used to flow back in the Korean old days of two years ago, though maybe those parts'll seem inevitable in their order once they get ground into me over multiple hearings, as finally happened with "Volume Up" and "Sexy Love," in any event seem to fit K-pop's growing formal ferment.
Jiyeon abandons her uninflected breathiness for actual emoting, the brief beginning of which ("neo manhi nal utge haneun") reminds me of the strong cross-ocean ache in Pajama Party's and Brenda K. Starr's "Over And Over"**; the song's passion is on her shoulders even more than Eunjung's, and she carries it. Although for the long run I'm uneasy if this turns out to be a change in Jiyeon's role,*** this time it works in the song's general pitch of T-ara joy and anxiety. To top everything, Hyomin does a bleaty barky thing in a "rap" that once again, typically for T-ara, is more compelling than most real rappers' real raps.
But maybe the year's top T-ara story is Qri and Boram finding themselves in a carefreeness that no one would believe from the others.
*I'm not saying the dispareteness I hear in these three songs is deliberate. But (for instance) on all three I've yet to pick out a part that's unequivocally the chorus.
**It's hard for me to justify this connection, though, since Jiyeon's not singing the same notes; but I'm thinking of the melodic push when Pajama Party sings "love me" "move me" "tell me" "touch me" "tell me" "hold me," which also reminds me of the Dells on the title phrase "There Is" and the Four Seasons in the title phrase "Begging" — which isn't to say that Jiyeon's an emotional match for any of them, and as I say it's not typical Jiyeon. But anyhow: mandatory
koganbot freestyle evocation.***Uneasy because I don't think she has the voice for it (she does the passion well here by turning the heat up a little while not getting in the way of the melody, but I don't think she could add it when required, or knock the daylights out of it at a climax), but also uneasy because with Soyeon, Hyomin, and Eunjung already emoting, T-ara don't need Jiyeon to do the passion thing — while they do need her to do Jiyeon. Of all my T-ara wonderments, and T-ara's wondrous mints, Jiyeon's effective uninflectedness is the most puzzling. I think of her as (accidentally or not) doing a social equivalent to what Billie Holiday did musically: Holiday imposed her own pace on songs, e.g. by taking a phrase or two to sing duple against a song's triple meter. Of course, Billie was a genius and Jiyeon is not. But Jiyeon creates a presence for herself by holding back. I wrote about this more extensively last year in "Wan For The Win," about her being a sonic space of paleness and clarity within a general T-ara hub-bub and how in early "Roly-Poly" live gigs she dominates an effervescent performance by not once cracking a smile. (I'll also refer you to Dave Hickey's great "Mitchum Gets Out Of Jail" essay in O.K. You Mugs, quoting Mitchum as to how as an actor you have to set your own pace in counter to the rest of what's going on: "The projector will be rolling, the cameras will be panning, the angle of the shots will be changing, and the distance of the shots will be changing, and all these things have their own tempo, so you have to have a tempo, too. If you sit or stand or talk the way you do at home, you look silly on the screen, incoherent. On the screen, you have to be purposive... So a lot of times, in a complicated scene, the best thing to do is to stand absolutely still, not moving a muscle. This would look very strange if you did it at the grocery store, but it looks okay on screen because the camera and the shots are moving around you."
In order of preference (thumb solidly up on 1 through 6, my feelings as yet unknown on "I Know The Feeling"):
1. "Do We Do We"
2. "Number 9"
3. "Target"
4. "Painkiller"
5. "Maybe Maybe"
6. "Deja-Vu" (on Treasure Box)
7. "I Know The Feeling" a.k.a. "Because I Know"
8. "Bunny Style" and the rest of the B-sides, which are subjects for further research, since I officially Don't Get It
9. The other two newbies on Treasure Box
10. "Hurt" and "Don't Marry" (on Again), which I haven't really listened to but seem merely okay, if "Don't Marry" is even that
11. "Bikini"
There's also Whatever else I forgot or that slipped by (there's always something), such as the unheard by me "Again 1977."
[Oh, and nowadays my new threads are being overrun by spam for the first week or so; don't let that discourage you; I clear the spam whenever I get the chance.]
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I guess it's too much effort to learn the UZA choreography. Doing UZA would probably also require admitting that the AKB empire isn't quite so talentless after all, which in turn kind of ruins the "elite Korean talent" niche Kpop groups are riding on.
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Someday this sort of J-pop will hit me and everything else will sound pale and placid in comparison.
T-ara make me think of Avis (we may not be number one in talent or even number ten but We Try Harder).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3xOJqM2LM
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Jiyeon uses this quality very well when acting; like Natalie Dormer, she's born to play Anne Boleyns and Irene Adlers. She only needs a couple of seconds in this video to be vividly, genuinely scary, smiling unhinged through the flames. But also like Natalie Dormer, this villainess quality of hers is a by-product of the face she was born with, rather than an act per se. I think it's simply very easy for people to cast her as the villain in real life as well.
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Number Nine is T-ara on form in my opinion though they don't seem to want to add those trademark t-ara rap verses anymore. Thirteen days later they're still on the instiz top 5 so they're not doing too bad these days.
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I doubt T-ara will ever again approach their 60 million points on Gaon for week two of "Roly-Poly" (though as you've mentioned, Gaon's point system has been so erratic and shifting that it's not easy to use as a standard).