Frank Kogan

Haven't listened yet to the whole Farrah Abraham album or followed much of the discussion. But Phil Freeman calls it "pure outsider art — fucking brilliant. Makes Peaches and Le Tigre sound like Taylor Swift." And Dave seems to be endorsing this characterization, "outsider art," in his Atlantic piece. Not sure whether or not I'd use it on her, or how often I'd use it on anyone. But to poke around further, let's ask the following questions:

(1) What is Farrah Abraham outside of?

(2) What might she be inside of? Who might her models and sources be?

I'm thinking of people like Teena Marie, Sophie B. Hawkins, Stevie Nicks — not as Farrah's sources or models, but as people who had sources and models themselves for their ideas of song lyrics and liner-note poetry; they were drawing on ideas of poetry that were probably as abundant as "real" poets' ideas, if not more abundant.*

EDIT (June 2019): Farrah seems to have deleted all the vids from My Teenage Dream Ended, but here, at least, is what she sounded like ("On My Own"):


END EDIT

( And Bob and Jim, in parens )

Most translation sites just copy others, often without attribution. So there's one basic translation of T-ara's "Lovey-Dovey" going around, possibly originating at pop!gasa. Here's the first verse and the chorus. Translators, I'm not impressed, especially not by "those passing by couples." (The ~ sign after "Woo" means a whole lotta woo, I guess (I hear "oo oo-oo oo-oo, oo oo-oo oo-oo").)

( It's so cliché )

( It's clear )

These translations leaving me unfulfilled, I decided to take matters into my own hand. Well, not my hand, or even my mind, as I don't speak Korean. But the magical hand of Google Translate. Grabbing Hangul lyrics from Chacha 짱, we see this:

( 너무 뻔해 )

Today alone, I do not like the math I
Oh, this day is finally bored
(Ooo ooo woowoowoo woowoowoo)'ll pass

Look, look at a passing couple there
I can love you like that
(Ooo ooo woowoowoo woowoowoo) Ooh I feel so lonely

I Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Do not let alone anymore
Now, Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Oh where are you in
Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Sure you will find her
I melt the frozen too long, you know where the hell

This is great! Alone, I don't like the math either. "I melt the frozen, you know where the hell." Indeed I do.

( Hair defeats fire )

How widely used is the term "co-ed" as a noun meaning "a female student"?

I'd have thought that in the U.S., at least, the term was archaic. Almost all schools in America now have male and female students.* I've never heard the term in conversation. However, in Korea, there is a mediocre K-pop group called "Co-Ed School," one of the few idol groups to have both males and females.

I first considered asking this question a week ago, when I'd hunted down an Erik Erikson quotation I'd remembered inexactly from having read it in 1970. It had stayed in my memory for a fundamentally different reason, the phrase "compared to what?," which relates to the psychosocial explorations of mine that I entitle "Relativism: So What?," and I'll give it its own entry one of these days. But I also remembered that it contained the term "co-ed," the word surprising me when I read it, and that's the word I used in the Web search that successfully tracked down the quote. I'd originally seen the passage in the Erikson collection Identity: Youth And Crisis, and in my memory I assumed the essay was from the late 1940s, the term "co-ed" dating it in my mind. Surprisingly, I see that the essay was based on a lecture that he gave in 1960. Although some prestige schools like Yale remained male-only until the late 1960s, I've assumed the term "co-ed" had been long moot by 1960, coeducation being so overwhelmingly common. Again, I don't recall ever hearing the word in conversation, and I grew up about a half mile from a college campus.

So last Wednesday, when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating that her college include birth control in its health package, he started off, "What does it say about the college co-ed ... who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?"

( YouTube searches )

Wow! I'd never heard this before! Writer Kenzie* and producers Bloodshy & Avant take a dramatic "Reach Out I'll Be There"–type melody, throw it into waltz time, and make it a funny, bumpy promenade. [EDIT: I meant to say they throw it into SWING time. My brain went herky-jerky there for a second. In any event, this most certainly isn't a waltz; it's 4/4, but each of those beats then subdivides further into triplets.]



The dance is terrific too, each of SNSD coming in from the side or down the aisle and then out onto the runway.

So Lazy Reblog Week continues here on Koganbot, hat-tip this time to just_keep_on. "Chocolate Love" was part of the promo campaign for LG Electronics' Cyon division's Chocolate BL-40 phone, back in '09. Also in on the campaign, the group f(x) did an even dancier, bumpier version; not quite as good, though, owing to their singing not being as warm as SNSD's. Also, being the Electronic Pop version, it lacks SNSD's tubas and honky-tonk.

(Phone commercials seem to have an important role in K-pop: especially there's the epic Lee Hyori video for Samsung's Anystar, the third of three major video productions she did for Samsung. This video also served as trainee Park Bom's debut, Bom going on to fame in 2NE1. And according to Wikip, Miss A's early public performances pre-Min, in China, included appearances on behalf of Samsung China's Anycall campaign.)

*EDIT: See comment thread. Checking the Korean Copyright Association writers' credits, Kenzie isn't listed at all for this song, whereas Bloodshy & Avant (Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg) are, as well as Henrik Jonback, so that's three of the four writers of "Sweet Dreams My L.A. Ex." But when we get to the fourth credit, Cathy Dennis is missing and Karen Poole is in her place. Checking Wikip's page for Karen Poole, though, and it doesn't include "L.A. Ex" among her compositions, so I don't know, except I think I've done all the research I want to do for today.

Over the last few months several groups from the commercial lower tiers of K-pop have been at least as exciting as the big names. Foremost among them is New.F.O, whose "Bounce" would be a candidate for my 2012 P&J had the single not come out in late November, eight days before my December 1 cutoff date. The vid poses the question, "Don't we wish we were alien spaceship masters like 2NE1?," and the synths give us laser rays to match; but the singing is Fat Cat times five, these kitties sticking high-pitched electropopsicles hard in our ear.



Also recommended: ChoColat "I Like It," After School "Rambling Girls," Clazzi ft. Koti & Jubi "Sexy Doll," Sunny Hill "The Grasshopper Song."

"'The euro zone is a slow-motion train wreck,' Mr. Roubini said during a separate panel discussion."

Slow-wreck aficionados will note that this is better than a couple of months ago, when Europe was on the train-wreck fast track owing to the ECB's then-unwillingness to purchase Spanish and Italian bonds.*

Confused centipede attempts to mate with mealworm pupa


*It's not directly purchasing them now, but, according to Krugman at any rate, it's doing the functional equivalent, essentially laundering the purchases through banks.

Mark informs us, "This is the time of year when I require a POLL OF ALL THE POLLS, to diminish the absurdly extensive 'end of year' music commentary I am almost certainly never going to get round to reading."

[Poll #1813388]

The Korean Copyright Association writers' credits website is a pain in the neck owing to its decision to print everything in Romanized lettering. I would say, for instance, that the syllables "MA I THI MA U SEU" are not actually a useful way of communicating that a group's name is Mighty Mouth. (That it was in fact Mighty Mouth took me ten minutes to figure out, by first using an online transliteration tool to get "마 이 ㅌ히 마 우 스," then going to Google translate and playing with the spacing to get "마이 ㅌ히 마우스," which Google translate guessed was "My ㅌhi mouse" and I went, "Oh, they probably mean Mighty Mouth." Btw, "마이 ㅌ 히 마우스" translates as "Hi My articles about the mouse." Google translate itself is in an early stage of emotional development, I think - somewhere between "autonomy vs. shame and doubt" and "initiative vs. guilt.") It also doesn't help that there are at least two systems of romanization, and the website is using the less common; so, e.g., I've gotten that Mighty Mouth's "E Neo Ji feat. Seon Ye" is probably Mighty Mouth's "Energy" feat. Sun Ye of the Wonder Girls, but this was not by going from roman to Hangul to English but just by running a Google search for "Mighty Mouth" "feat. Seon Ye." But "E Neo Ji" Hangulizes as "에 너 지," which when condensed to "에너지" does indeed register as "Energy" on Google translate, so that's relatively easy. Haven't gotten anywhere with "Deul Eo Bwa" by Jyu Eol Ri S yet, however.

All this during a search on Sinsadong Horangee a.k.a. Shinsadong Tiger, who seems to be having a Lieber-Stoller couple of years, what with "Mirror Mirror," "Roly-Poly," and "Bubble Pop!" just in the last few months. I'm trying to fill in the history.

Strong little dance-pop track from Mina, a Korean singer who's more popular in China, former Miss World Cup, two versions (and two titles), one in Chinese and the other in Korean:

Chinese version:



Korean version:

[Can't find this anywhere anymore.]

There's something slightly goth I like in her voice, an icy touch. Think I prefer the Chinese, though I can't say why. Maybe 'cause it's the first track on her EP and the Korean is the fourth track, and by the time I got there I'd already grown comfortable with the first. According to a YouTube commenter, the rapper, Nikita, is Mina's sister, though I have no idea if that's true. Don't know Mina's history, 'cept a few things I scarfed up on YouTube in the last few minutes. Tended to like what I heard, esp. "Answer The Phone," which is a cover of this, but Mina's version has bits of Cypress Hill squiggle-squeaks. Also, I root for her 'cause she's closer in age to me than to the younger members of Orange Caramel.

EDIT: Hmmmm, Mina's voice sounds more anono and blah the more I listen, and has less sparkle, though I stand by those bits of ice. She does seem to have gotten a number of real good tracks (here's another).

I've been posting on a comments thread to La increíble verdad Redux, a Spanish-language blog by Iván Conte. There've been a number of different topics, one of which is the state of music criticism in Spain, a subject I know nothing about for the very good reason that I don't understand Spanish.

You might immediately ask, therefore, how do I manage to post on that comment thread, and the answer is that I've been posting in English - used the Google automatic translation program to get a vague sense of what Iván and his friend anhh were talking about, then jumped in, and since they know English they were kind enough to switch languages. The language becomes English at post 7. (By the way, anhh has occasionally posted on my lj.)

( Music criticism in Spain )

Iván says that any of us who wants to contribute to the topic is more than welcome. As I said, I'm somewhat handicapped by not knowing anything about it and not knowing the language, but maybe several of you do know the language. (And of course you - and they - are welcome to post here too.)