Frank Kogan

re "Knock Knock": I started liking Twice more when I started being able to distinguish individual voices -- at least Jungyeon, Mina, Dahyun. Everybody else admittedly sounds similar to each other. With CLC I can distinguish Sungyeon (sometimes), Sorn (usually), and I guess Yeeun (or, rather, when the Hyuna-like rapping starts I assume it's Yeeun).

I forgot to add Oh My Girl's "Coloring Book" because I'm ambivalent about it; it's too much of a muchness and apparently I get irritated when Mimi doesn't rap. But I'm still a sucker for Binnie and Seunghee in particular.

"365 Fresh" doesn't do much for me at all. There's no reason to have Hyuna doing Bruno Mars knockoffs.

What is Q-pop? That is a very interesting (implied) question to which I don't have the answer. The impression I get is that no one was using "Q-pop" to refer to Kazakh pop until Ninety One, and so "Q-pop" refers specifically to that subset of Kazakh pop that draws from K-pop. Figuring out how big that subset is, though, and how much it owes to K-pop, is trickier, at least for me with no knowledge of Kazakh/Russian. Like it's awfully tempting to wonder Ayumi is drawing from (my first guess was 4Minute, but there's no rapping and 4Minute was never able to build up harmonies in the prechorus. Girl's Day?). But it's also tempting to think that the three guy groups with the capital-A Aesthetic (Renzo, Black Dial, Ninety One) are pretty much it; so far Kazakh pop doesn't have the mass explosion of debuts that Korean pop has seen in the last five years.

(If you look at the Gakku Weekly Top 10, songs seem to linger for a while; that's the 28 April edition I just linked you to, and "Sendei" is still in there despite having been released last September. "Kalai karaisyn" is still #1 despite having been released in DECEMBER and having been the third single off a year-old mini when it was released. I have no idea how Gakku calculates its Weekly Top 10.)

The other thing I am 100% ignorant of is Kazakh hip-hop. If K-pop is in part descended from Seo Taiji's decision to throw in rap, what is Q-pop rap descended from?

Anyway in case I didn't link it in my original ramble here's Yerbolat Bedelkhan's original group, Orda:



(link)

(They have bigger hits but "Zhauap Ber" is my favorite.)

ALSO OKAY you have been spared (so far) my ravings about Ninety One's new single, but suffice to say I was expecting them to do Aiyptama 2.0, and "Su Asty" is... not that:



(link to the version on Ninety One's channel, which has English subs; there's a Gakku version [which is probably the one being counted for the Weekly Top 10] but it's sub-free as best I can tell.)

for the record I wish they hadn't gone that direction with the video, since it opens them up to charges of just being YG-wannabes from fans familiar with previous Big Bang / Epik High / Bobby videos. But I don't remember any YG groups doing metal-esque (???) growls and parts where the percussion seems to be deliberately drowning out the singers/rappers and songs where the individual parts end a full minute before the song itself does. I can't tell whether "Su Asty" is genuinely weird (by which I mean, whether it sounds weird to someone who wasn't familiar with Ninety One's earlier work) or it just seems weird to me because I was expecting something more conventional.

anyway. link/embed/quote away! I did just yesterday locate someone who's published Actual Academic Papers on Kazakh pop (though not Q-pop) so I'm hoping I get a chance to pick her brain.