Frank Kogan

Am expecting to link my original June 2011 LJ writeup on Miss A's "Breathe" in a couple of days; in the meantime I'm reposting here its original comment thread. This particular thread became very important to me because in it askbask gave me the beginning of a primer on dancers and choreography in K-pop, and he embedded some terrific dance performances – in the case of BoA's dance rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I'd say simply my favorite dance performance ever, by anyone: It's not as stunning as the best of, say, Astaire and James Brown, but for basic joy in motion I've never seen anything I'd rather look at.

The reason I'm now giving these comments their own post is that most of the video embeds were eventually either deleted from YouTube or, because they used shockwave flash, they're no longer functional. The original comment thread is just a mess to look at, full of blank space and links that don't work. And because we can't update any comments that have received a reply, there's no good way to put the correct video embeds anywhere near where we'd originally posted them. And Dreamwidth, where people nowadays are most likely to discover this thread, doesn't have the capability of embedding videos in comments anyway.

And I love reliving askbask's awestruck response to "Into The New World," and I want you to experience it too.*

Anyway, I recommend that you start with the original post, linked here:

Athletic R&B: Miss A BREATHE

So here's the reconstituted comment thread, though you'll see that I haven't been able to restore everything yet:

askbask
2011-06-26 04:26 am (local)

Athleticism.

Min (miss A) – Strong Heart

Watch on YouTube

2010.10.05 strong heart_ Miss A Min Dance

Watch on YouTube

Might've been mentioned before, but Min spent some years in the US, preparing for a launch and recording un-released single 'Boyfriend', before the debut was cancelled and she joined Miss A. Sounds like something Cassie also could've recorded, never released and then had leaked.

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Boyfriend"

Watch on YouTube

Miss A released their (quite listenable) 'Love Again' single and video as a three member group.

koganbot
2011-06-28 12:08 pm (local)

Wow, there are a whole string of these (the rest being [her dancing to] other people's tracks, it seems):

MIN (JYP Trainee) – Dancing to "Radar"

Watch on YouTube

Who are considered the really good dancers in K-pop? I'd think Min'd be near the top. There are some names mentioned in this YouTube thread.

askbask
2011-06-28 12:39 pm (local)

Yeah Min is one of them. The Chinese Miss A members as well, Jia and Fei.

BoA is #1.

090605 ExtraTV BoA's Raw Rehearsal

Watch on YouTube

She just finished shooting a US dance flick (Cobu 3D) in the Step Up tradition, lead role vs Derek Hough.

Former BoA back-up dancer Kahi

As mentioned in those comments, Hyoyeon, Minzy

Unfortunately Sori's own underperforming singles haven't given her opportunities for Ciara-like moves.



Guys: Jay Park, Taeyang, Rain, TVXQ

koganbot
2011-06-29 12:03 am (local)

I like all four of the Miss A's, but Min is the standout, has an extra suppleness, as if every single one of her muscles can hear and speak. Just amazing the way she has of letting the music ripple through her.

Fei is effective in a different way: she's tall and this gives a false sense of gawkiness, with an almost comic faux frightenedness in her eyes; it's very funny and hard to keep one's own eyes off of.

Watching that BoA rehearsal increased my respect for BoA 100%. I've never gotten her as a singer, though haven't heard much of her voluminous repertoire. I borrowed her American album from the Denver Public Library last month. A lot of the material is excellent, especially the stuff from Jonback/Bloodshy & Avant, a track called "Touched" in particular. There was this dance gorgeousness, a desire ready to saturate the atmosphere. But I got the feeling I sometimes get from Keri Hilson of an absence in the middle. The tracks seemed to be waiting for their Cassie, or Britney, or someone, a missing ache or neediness that needed to seep into the music. She was singing well, but not injecting enough character.

But looking at the rehearsal for "Look Who's Talking," I see immediately that BoA's got something: her whole demeanor, a completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space and an elastic joy that's capable of owning every cubic centimeter in the room, should she find her way to it. Maybe the trouble with the album is that the music doesn't reflect this ease, this motion. Maybe she needed more hip-hop, more disco, I'm not sure.

askbask
2011-06-29 12:29 am (local)

Yes.. I think she shines with this stuff

BoA / 永遠

Watch on YouTube

askbask
2011-06-29 02:08 am (local)

"completely flexible confidence, a casual command of space"

Exactly! Will be quoting this when talking about her strengths to others. I haven't always been happy with her singles, but am still mostly transfixed by her live performances because of this.

askbask
2011-07-21 01:21 pm (local)

This is the most impressive dance performance I've ever seen from a girl group. It almost beggars belief. The stuff around the 3 minute mark is just scary.

[Pre-Debut] ★Girls' Generation (SNSD)★ ▶『Into The New World』Jul 19, 2007

Watch on YouTube

Helps that it's all lipsynced – it's noticably less sharp on regular performances – and that the camera is fixed so we get the amazing sync work and units moving around the stage. I don't expect them to ever match this level again because it was their debut track and they exclusively practiced this choreography for such a long time.

koganbot
2011-07-21 03:32 pm (local)

I quite like the popping/locking at 2:00 as well. Who was the dancer there? (I've made little effort yet to distinguish the members of SNSD; that's a subject for further research.)

askbask
2011-07-22 12:05 am (local)

Hyoyeon

( TVXQ! Miss A dance tutorial )

*I doubt I'll ever really get to a wholesale updating of the embeds and links on my old comment threads. Fixing the posts themselves was hard enough, and I'm still not done. These old K-pop threads in particular, though, are crucial because I discovered through them a bunch of people (anhh, tarigwaemir, petronia, askbask) who knew far more about Korean music than I did and who were eager to teach me (and then we were joined by a slew of others: Christophe, belecrivain, skyecaptain, davidfrazer, arbitrary_greay, sub_divided, Maddie, and whoever else dropped in).

CROSSPOST: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/392301.HTML

CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-athletic

Okay, three data points constituting a trend, Miss A, putting "Time's Up" on their new Independent Women Pt. III EP, become the latest K-pop group to mix trot beats and Austral-Romanian int'l rhythm moves.*

Watch on YouTube

(Also, unrelated to trot or to Romance Australianisms, the lead track and single is "I Don't Need A Man," and the second or third track (depending which listing you see) is called "If I Were A Boy." That and the EP title probably don't remind anyone of anything, but I thought I'd mention them.)

*Of the ten tracks** on my Austral-Romanian mix, Gangkiz's "Honey Honey" probably and Orange Caramel's "Lipstick" definitely include a trot feel. "Trot feel" is not something I can specify, especially when the tracks aren't explicitly trot; but these two instances include emphasized offbeats and a way of pushing the tempo, even when it's not that fast.

**Of course I included an eleventh track, LPG's "The First Train," which is trot but isn't very Austral-Romanian, and was there for reference.

Trevor's got an in-depth analysis of the "Gee" video and the male gaze or absence thereof. If I'm interpreting his basic point right, it's that the video is about girls having fun with girls, not about how they appear to some guy — or maybe more emphatically, it's about the girls having fun with girls while abandoning the gaze of some guy. As far as it goes, this analysis seems right, and matches what I think about Miss A's live routine for "Breathe," which is that it's not about some guy making them breathless; rather, the supposed breathlessness is a pretext for the young women* to clown around with each other.

Except I don't think that puts the issue to rest, not by a long shot. What I find limited in Trevor's analysis is that he's talking about the story in the video but he's not talking about the story of the video in the world. For instance, I'm looking at the video. So's Trevor. So are you. I don't see that the video has subtracted our eyes.

An incomplete list of gazes, gazers, etc. that might be relevant:

--The characters in the video
--The performers in the video
--Who the videomakers envision might be looking at the video
--The videomakers themselves (incl. performers, costumers, editors, financiers, etc.)
--The assumptions the videomakers make about the audiences for the video, about the audiences' expectations regarding music etc., audiences' role in fandom and their vision of the world, and about how the audiences are likely to use the video, etc.**
--The experiences and assumptions of the videomakers themselves about video, music, life; their vision of potential worlds etc.
--The actual audiences for the video and how they see such videos; their visions of the world and of potential worlds; how they use the video in their lives
--The people writing about the video; the writers' assumptions and visions etc. and their assumptions about their readers' assumptions and visions etc.
--The social classes/categories of the aforementioned (which obv. include age and gender but include a lot of other stuff too)
--How all these gazes, gazers, uses, etc. may change over time, the use of the video not being fixed

( More gazing, plus footnotes )

Wonder Girls were rollin' and rockin' the Jukebox last Friday. I'm in the comments with a minor dissent, my main problem being that I keep hearing a motif from Miss A's "Bad Girl Good Girl" in "Be My Baby" (both songs are by JYP), which makes me want the latter to be "Bad Girl Good Girl." But it doesn't get there. "Bad Girl Good Girl" sticks, hurts, while this rolls nicely in double time with some early Motown melodicism. So this is really something quite different, and I may be underrating it.





My favorite Wonder Girls track ever is "So Hot," and my favorite tracks on Wonder World are "Act Cool" and "Stop!" "Act Cool" reminds me of that goofy Ashlee Simpson song, "Hot Stuff," the one where she says she can move her leg up all the way.

Inspired to post this not just because I adore it, but also 'cause 67seven52 called "athletic R&B" his new favorite phrase. On this track, Miss A obviously put a lot of work into something that you'd think would feel light as a feather. Maybe if they'd put even more work into it, it would have actually seemed as light as that, and the effort would have been invisible. The sweat and strenuousness make it charming anyway, or make it especially charming, the performers give so much. Also love the way the song's love object, some guy over whom the girls are supposedly left breathless, is just a pretext for a bunch of clowning and panting, more a group bonding thing than an infatuation.

I want to know where the style of that intro to the chorus comes from, the one that starts the song and that recurs in front of the second verse and whenever the chorus reappears. Sounds like Verdi, or operetta, or Gilbert & Sullivan. Should ask Jonathan Bogart. Excellent for the way it throws gossamer and confetti over the basic squealing-brake techno 'n' r&b that follows. And then the live routine pulls a hilarious variation on the James Brown collapse-and-revival routine (starts at 3:27). (Song's producer, Park Jin-young, is obviously a big James Brown fan.)

( Athletes )

( Amid Footwear Mishap, Plucky Performer Perseveres )

[EDIT April 2024: The comment thread for this post became one of the most important ever for me, owing to askbask using it to create a kind of primer of the best dancers and choreography in K-pop at that time. Unfortunately, the thread is almost unreadable now for a whole bunch of reasons: Some of the embeds were uploads that got deleted from YouTube, and even where they weren't deleted, the old standard LiveJournal embed code used shockwave flash, and LJ will no longer show embeds with shockwave flash. Etc. – And if you're reading this on Dreamwidth, the Dreamwidth platform doesn't have the capability of showing embeds in comments anyway. Normally I'd try to fix the thread by adding new embeds and comments, but this thread is now too much of a mess. So instead I've created a whole new post (April 28, 2024) devoted to recreating as much of the comment thread as possible. Here's the link for it, "Hoisted from the archives: Athletic R&B comments reconstituted." (I'm linking you the Dreamwidth version because Dreamwidth gives us better-looking blockquotes, but I've posted it on LJ as well.)]

Korean pop content over on poptimists. So when are you all going to start writing about K-pop? Especially if you are katstevens and you have a blog called The Vids Are Alright? Or you are dubdobdee and you managed North Korea in the Pop World Cup, or you are chuckeddy or freakytigger or skyecaptain or girlboymusic or martinskidmore or piratemoggy or jeff_worrell or hoshuteki or atommickbrane or miss_newham or cis or anthonyeaston or xyzzzz__ or braisedbywolves or... does anybody else use livejournal anymore?*

Anyhow, here's my K-pop tag, though you have to go to the comments to find most of the commentary and embeds, by people who know more than I do.

Meantime, performer to ponder = E.via. Seems to be in the Robyn/GaGa category, cutie-pie who's more sociologically like me than are other cutie-pies. Wonder if on that basis she could do well with, say, the current U.S. audience for Robyn.

Is it coincidence that most of the performers that we're discussing happen to be female, or is this an era where women make better frontpeople in K-pop just as they make better frontpeople in Anglo-American pop these days? (Crisis of masculinity part 1,061.)

*Who might be interested in K-pop, anyway: askbask, anhh (Anonymous), petronia, tarigwaemir, and I are carrying the conversation by ourselves, even if one of us - me - seems not to know what he's talking about.