koganbot: (Default)
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.)

(Btw, [livejournal.com profile] arbitrary_greay and [livejournal.com profile] askbask have you heard this?)

Target, Jeon Won Diary, Bikini, Painkiller )

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.

Footnotes, Pajama Party, Robert Mitchum, rankings )

koganbot: (Default)
If we think of disco and Italodisco as being to the '70s and '80s what rock 'n' roll was to the '50s and early '60s, and if we think of techno and acid house and some of the other visionary stuff in the broad electronic dance area as being to the '80s and '90s and onward what rock was to the '60s and early '70s, then let's say there's the tendency within techno/EDM to embrace its lost rock 'n' roll/disco self in the same way that in the late '60s and early '70s the punks and glamsters and glitter babes were rediscovering their own lost rock 'n' roll/pop/punk selves and inventing something new out of it. One of the words that emerged when "the punk rock movement" started to go big was "power pop." According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Pete Townshend back in 1967. But as an idea (Greg Shaw's I think, though I don't recall if I was reading his own words on the subject or other people who were crediting him), it doesn't emerge until the late '70s, the idea being that, while punk was a necessary moment of destruction, the music we really want is more open and expansive, a broader palette, hence "power pop" (the term subsequently designating something far too narrow, unfortunately, but that's not Greg's fault). So my thesis is that the real new power pop — as opposed to rock-based throwbacks like "Bar Bar Bar" — is EDM in its more pop and cheesy and reductively opportunist impulses (of course, my def'n of "new" here goes back to the early '90s; one of the advantages of being old is I can take "new" back a long ways; e.g., to me anything Dylan did after 1967 is "late Dylan").

Of course, the '70s and '80s weren't the '50s and '60s, and techno etc. wasn't/isn't the new version of the supposed '60s rock revolution, though I actually think there's a hunk to be gained from exploring those analogies. Disco didn't have nearly as much of rock 'n' roll's air of insurgency, but like r'n'r it took the funk 'n' groove of its time while carrying itself as if to say "we can bring this to the whole world, and use anything in the world in our sound." (Hip-hop also felt it could use anything but was very much about staking out its own territory.) And disco was probably more insurgent and utopian than outsiders realized, just as rock 'n' roll and rock were more of a consumer niche and less insurgent than claimed. (Not that being a consumer niche forestalls all insurgency.)

Pushing the analogy )

"One (Always Hardcore)"


モーニング娘。 『愛の軍団』(Morning Musume。["GUNDAN" of the love])


モーニング娘。 『わがまま 気のまま 愛のジョーク』(Morning Musume。[Selfish,easy going,Jokes of love])


Notes )

Extreme Pop

Jun. 4th, 2006 05:21 pm
koganbot: (Default)
I posted this over on the rolling teenpop thread.

xhuxk was talking to me about Decibel magazine, which devotes itself to extreme metal, and after I got off the phone I got the idea that if you could designate some things "extreme metal" you should also be able to designate things "extreme pop."

So, my nominations for EXTREME POP would include:

Mariah Carey (esp. her 1991 peak) because she's just fuckin' extreme, and 'cause she squeaks.
Napoleon XIV's "They're Coming to Take Me Away" because it's extremely silly and irritating and because the flipside is the same song played backwards which causes people to shoot themselves in the head.
The Veronicas' "4ever" for its deliriously gorgeous harmonies.
Boney M for being guilelessly eclectic.
Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park," because someone left the cake out in the rain.
Lindsay Lohan's video for "Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)"
Johnny Ray
The Shangri-Las
Little Richard

You can figure out what's extreme about the last three. This list is just to get the concept going.

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