Frank Kogan

Anybody know anything about this? According to Billboard, it's been on the K-pop chart for 39 weeks, never getting above 35. A trot rhythm, ballad-like but definitely Asian. In the olden days, this would have been my stereotype of what Asian pop sounds like. Touches of what seem like country & western, but the resemblance may be a coincidence (though I wouldn't assume it's a coincidence). Also, a few big-band r&b horn flourishes.

Presumably, it's old people who listen to this. I'm an old person, and I like it.

Watch on YouTube

[EDIT: YouTube took down the studio version, so here's a live performance. RE-EDIT: And then they took that one down; here's one that may or may not be the same one]
Longest-running K-pop qua K-pop tracks in the top 50 are Ailee's "Heaven" (which is a big ballad, really, though I'll count it as K-pop given that K-poppers give it their ears), 15 weeks, and Big Bang's "Fantastic Baby," 12 weeks. The Gaon chart doesn't list longevity, but goddamn "Moves Like Jagger" is still in the Top 100 after 9 months or so. T-ara's "Lovey-Dovey" just fell out of the Top 100 after approximately 20 weeks; IU's "You And I" and Trouble Maker's "Trouble Maker" are still in the low 100s after about 25.

Unlike American pop, K-pop has a blockbuster pattern. Releases are events, and they get crowded out by the next week's events. Even the most popular songs stay only several weeks near the top. SNSD's mark of 9 consecutive wins for "Gee" on Music Bank in early '09 will likely never be beaten. (The Gaon chart didn't exist yet. I think it's slightly easier for a teen-oriented K-pop song to hang onto number one on the TV performance show charts than on Gaon, since ballads aren't as much in the competition. But still, 2 weeks is a lot and 4 weeks is dominating. Not sure how IU's "You And I" did on the performance charts, but it stayed atop Billboard K-pop for a solid 5 weeks, and remained in the top 10 for a total of 9. See Wikipedia's Korea K-Pop Hot 100 entry for the other long runners.)

So far The Voice in 2012 has produced no moments of genius to match Dia Frampton's "Heartless," though "Cinderella" is audacious enough to make me think there's a chance we'll get one. And I've found six standouts that are better than good (and I'm doing this all by YouTube, so my listening hasn't been all-inclusive). Here they are in no particular order:


[Lindsey Pavao "Say Ahh"]

Wobbly quirks with pebbles and glass thrown in. Lindsey's not yet got the command that a Taylor Swift or a Xenia has to turn her uncertainties into aesthetic bull's eyes, but the wavers and swallowed words fit this performance fine.


[Son Seung-yeon vs. Oh Seul-gi "It's Raining Men"]

Impressed by how both of them have smoldering depths and high fires.

( I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola )

( Revenge of the Idol reject )

( Quirk Rising )

( The Quirk Strikes Back )

( Now I wanna be your daub )

h/t just_keep_on

Loose lips sink ships, but loose sync is the shit.

Excellent post by arbitrary_greay about "loose sync":

There are some cases where the performers can be putting their own spin on the same steps and yet still seeming in perfect sync. I like to call this "loose sync," as usually the music for these performances don't have the emphasis on the beat and feel looser as well. It's much harder to achieve loose sync because it's dependent on the chemistry between performers. Any decent dancers can achieve regular sync given enough rehearsal time in front of a mirror. But dancing differently and still feeling matched? That takes EVEN MORE rehearsal time, an innate understanding of how one's body moves to the music, and usually perfectionist tendencies from the parties involved.

Lots of embeds in the post; here's an example to whet your appetite:



( SweetS )

Mentioned in my last post that Korean freestyle rapper SOOLj has a leaning towards riffs out of the other freestyle as well, the great '80s postdisco dance music from Miami and NY and Jersey and Philly. Wouldn't be surprised if those riffs were all over Korea these days, though owing to the paucity of my knowledge, I've only found a few others, one of them being KARA's bright and lite "Jumping (점핑)":



("Freestyle lite" would seem to be a contradiction in terms, freestyle having been a music of passionate spirit and thick emotion, but there've actually been several excellent pop tracks in recent America that tone the freestyle down to a pang while still retaining the feeling: Vanessa Hudgens' "Don't Talk" and Brooke Hogan's "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdysSfFV2jo">About Us.")

"Today my body is acting strange, as if it doesn't belong to me." Returning to the locked ward, we present IU's new video, "The Story Only I Didn't Know":



The major aesthetic question is can even a singer as sensitive as IU get me to like ballads, the answer here being, "Well, she did this time, but she doesn't always."

The lyrics are basically, You were leaving for good, you never actually felt love, but I was the last to know. Or as the Zombies might have said, Well, no one told me about him, the way he lied. The video, however, surrounds the track in a whole psych-ward story, bathed in numbed-out, walking-dead white. So the shattering of what was probably a brief affair is a mental shattering as well, love leading to pathology, or love itself a form of insanity - 'cept just because they're in an asylum doesn't mean the video is presenting this extreme breakdown as anything but the way things are, a hyperbolic expression of how it feels, and no sense that love shouldn't be this devastating thing, or that maybe such devastation isn't love.

Dialogue at the end:

"Your father passed away, right?" "He will come back. Everyone thinks he is my dad. But that person... is not my dad," leading some YouTube commenters to think the video's adding an incest and abuse theme, or a stepdad theme, or both. But a simpler interpretation would just be that the doctor is trying to link up the young woman's trauma with the recent loss of her dad, whereas the woman's got a different man on her mind, loss piling upon loss.

Conveniently, today in America this vid is introduced by an ad for Source Code, a flick about a military man whose mind crosses over into another man's body.

Beautiful song.

( You must look like someone I once knew )

As usual, I'm cross-posting this over on Poptimists.

[UPDATE:As Mat informs me over on the "Plastic Face" thread, many LOEN Entertainment and Nega Network videos, including this one, are directed by Hwang Su-a (황수아; which also gets transliterated Hwang Soo Ah); she also did "Good Day" and "You And I" and Infinite's "Before The Dawn" and "Be Mine" and Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra" and Ga-In's "Irreversible," among others. An impressive track record.]

So far. And three of them are holdovers from last year, which I justify down in the wonky notes. I've already posted about Jeremih, the gorgeous tenuousness of the sounds seeming to have nothing to do with the booty-gazing lyrics. You likely already know about the Britney, and if you haven't heard "High High" yet, that's hardly my fault. "Knock Out" is a bouncing bit of spare and twisting bubble bubble gum-smacking Korean hip-hop that doesn't match up with anything else anywhere that I can think of and will get a post of its own someday soon.



Meanwhile, "Ready 4 Romance" is roll-along-the-floor techno-dance that could play in any disco anywhere, atmospherics echoing through the atmosphere and a breathy girl occasionally showing up to say she needs me. "S&M" sounds bright and silly where you'd expect it to be dark and domineering, and is better for it. "No 1," the instrumental version of a B-side of an aggressively chirpy Korean girl-group single, is a bit of throwaway dance funk with a snaking synth line. "Good Day" is a diva showcase that morphs into a disco showbiz hussy and is a brilliant song, even if warm and appealing IU is neither diva nor hussy and doesn't blaze across the track the way it needs her to. And finally "Mocha Java" is a cooing little come-on, the basic background sound from backwater Russian dance clubs to international airport bars, though this happens to be Taiwanese.

1. Jeremih "Down On Me"
2. Britney Spears "Hold It Against Me"
3. GD&TOP "High High"
4. GD&TOP "Knock Out"
5. Galaxy Dream ft. Turbotronic "Ready 4 Romance"
6. Rihanna "S&M"
7. Secret "No. 1 (Inst.)"
8. IU "Good Day"
9. Xoxo "Mocha Java"

I have no number ten, so you need to tell me what it should be.

( Wonky Notes )

Scruples force me to note that I have never actually been in a backwater Russian dance club. I admit it.

The Singles Jukebox, which is by far the best review site I see regularly,* has just started its second annual Amnesty Week: each of the regular writers nominates a favorite single that hasn't yet gotten a Jukebox review, and then we all review the nominees. Lots of good stuff; I've already awarded one 9, with two or three more to come, which surpasses the combined total from the rest of my Jukebox year.



Reviews of After School's "Bang!" are up, so you can see what I wrote there; but also I'd sent the reviewers an advance email to (in Will's words) "suggest to yr fellow writers why your nomination is worth a listen":

I nominated After School's "Bang!" which is a bunch of young idol-factory women playing toy soldier. This speaks for itself, if you know Korean and understand Korea. Or maybe Koreans are as baffled by it as I am and like being intrigued. The group are supposedly modeled after the Pussycat Dolls for their "matured and sexy concept," if you buy that. I wonder if this track sounds as violent to its prime K-pop audience as it does to me, violently bright - hip-hop and r&b shined up into an aggressively playful hardness. Then they go stunningly dreamy and gorgeous in the middle eight, and then shift right back to the violent shine.

( Immature and sexy concept )

*Also the only review site I see regularly, but there's good reason to look regularly.

I just discovered My First Love Story, a Tumblr whose author, Maddie, describes the blog's objectives as: "My ideas about/analyses of K-pop in relation to feminism, the music industry (both North American and Korean), and the portrayal of Asian femininity in media (both North American and Korean). Continued exploration of my diminished and/or burgeoning identity as a Korean/Chinese-Canadian woman who has never visited the country my mother came from over 40 years ago. Relations between K-pop and above exploration. Songs that I'm obsessed with. Pictures of idols that I'm obsessed with."

If you're like me (that's about three of you), you have now instantly bookmarked that blog and are this moment reading it, or are about to. For one thing, a lot about the look of the girl teen idols will make most of us immediately go "PROBLEMATIC PROBLEMATIC" but I, for one, feel way too ignorant of Korea or K-pop to think I have anything knowledgeable to say on the subject (which of course doesn't stop me from trying). So someone who knows and loves the music but doesn't duck the problems has my immediate esteem.

On that subject, I recommend that you go read anhh's heartfelt disaffection: "To be honest, lately I can't stand K-pop. I still consume it on the same way: enjoy the music (music videos, albums, etc.) you can enjoy, avoid the rest (fans, media, the propaganda). To be fair, I don't think that you can separate one from the other. Some of the things I like about K-pop (the belief that a song can be an event and/or can change your life, how this treatment applied on the producer side can make a song you don't care about something that you never want to get out of it, etc.) go hand in hand with the propaganda side of it." And on.

I'd say that the K-pop convos are the best to have occurred on my livejournal over the last year, thanks mostly to anhh and Mat, and since the conversations often will extend for days or weeks on a particular thread I urge you to periodically click my K-pop tag and revisit the threads (some of these being commentary on quarterly or year-end lists, with the K-pop content being rudimentary in my original post and only really developing down in the comments).

Back to Maddie's blog, a theme that's developing is that if you're Asian or Asian American in North America, Asianness will become an issue whether you want it to or not, and any attempt to break the Korean groups here will have to take this into account. I'll add a corollary, though, which is that if part of someone's heritage is black, everything changes, and the Asianness may even go unnoticed.

[EDIT: Add "or Latin American" after black in the previous sentence, or you can make it "black or Latin American or even though you've got no Latin American ancestry you played someone with a Latina name in High School Musical."]

Some excellent, excellent commentary on K-pop and J-pop (and a bit of Chinese pop) by Anonymous down in the comment thread to my mid-year lists, along with over a dozen video embeds.* Anyway, I'd like to stir up the local hivemind on what you think is going on in these three videos (and K-pop and J-pop in general, if you have any ideas; you're likely to know more than I, are extremely unlikely to know less, and shouldn't feel you have to know what you're talking about; I don't). First vid is Sandara's "Kiss" (Dara of 2NE1). Seems to be a standard, "I want your kiss, but your respect and commitment too, I'm not easy" story (while the lyrics are more "I want you to come through and kiss me," sorta like "Blah Blah Blah," though not really), so it's a flirtation, I'll-love-you-I'll-love-you-not, but there seems to be a cake-and-eat-it-too relationship to us, the viewers: is Sandara projecting strength or availability, is that a tension or can strength and availability go together? (Rapper, not in vid, is someone called CL, I think, and she's good.) Second vid is E.via's "Shake!" and from Anonymous's comments I gather she's really trying to have her cake and eat it too, pushing the envelope, critiquing and putting herself at a distance from the sex sell by throwing it in our faces, while at the same time, you know, still using the sex to sell. Of course, such strategies and such envelope-pushing occur in the U.S. too, and have the same tension and uneasiness, and get force from the tension and uneasiness, as does this. The Latin riffs help too.

Those two are K-pop, the third is from Japan, AKB48's "Keibetsu Shiteita Aijou," and when I was in my early teens I'd have lapped something like this up, 'cause it's about a suicide, and I lapped up songs about suicide: "Most Peculiar Man" and "Richard Cory" and "Save The Life Of My Child" by Simon & Garfunkel, Judy Collins' version of Leonard Cohen's "Dress Rehearsal Rag," which isn't a suicide per se but sure seems a suicide threat (Cohen hadn't recorded it yet; in a few years I made my way to his "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy"). "Keibetsu Shiteita Aijou" definitely plays the suicide as some form of rebuke, though it's complicatedly uncertain as to what the rebuke is rebuking: Our attempt to understand it? Adults with their know-it-all explanations? (Were the lyrics written by adults?) Is it a statement of a deeper wrong than just the dead girl's? As I said, as an early teen I lapped this stuff up — and by my mid teens I'd found Dylan and in my late teens I'd found the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, though this song doesn't romanticize self-destruction to the extent that those Americans did. But it does throw it at us as a brute fact.



( E.via Shake! )

( AKB48 Keibetsu Shiteita Aijou )

Click the k-pop tab for other good discussion we've had here on the subject, mostly not by me.

*Also, Chuck's lists and a link to Josh's are down there too.