Frank Kogan

On the latest 4minute EP, four* different sets of producers/writers make the same decision (or follow the same instructions), which is to create songs that have lots of empty space, highlighting each singer and song segment without worrying too much about tying sections together musically or emotionally. These tracks belong to a strange and interesting trend: strategies of incoherence, also being employed to a lesser or greater extent by G-Dragon ("Crayon"), SNSD ("I Got A Boy"), GLAM ("I Like That"), 4minute subunit 2Yoon ("24/7"), plus some others I can't think of this second.



Works pretty well. None of 4minute are bravura-type vocalists, but they're each distinct and can handle the spotlight. HyunA dominates, with bits of incantation and scraps of rap. She really enjoys being a star. The two Yoons twirl their melodies like lassos. Lots of fun. Mat complains regarding "What's Your Name" that "lalalas" are no good for this group, but I disagree. The lalalas fit 4minute's general demeanor of cheerfully contentious salaciousness, are just more seduction. I do find Brave Brothers' beats a bit weak and chintzy. If you're gonna go spare you need strong and dramatic architecture, not just mild percolation.** But the hook has stuck more than I expected. I do prefer "Whatever" (credited to the unknown-to-me Seo Jae Woo, D3O, and Aileen De La Cruz, the latter two being Canadian if my Internet search is steering me right):



*The fifth track, "Domino," is more standard and rather dull.

**I still don't know what I think of Brave Brothers. He's got four MAJOR tracks that I know of, which is a lot: Sistar's "Alone," Sistar19's "Gone Not Around Any Longer," Big Bang's "Last Farewell," and Son Dam-bi's & After School's "Amoled." On those two Sistar tracks, the chintz kind of counterbalances Hyorin's precisely aching and gorgeous vocals, prevents the singing from being too exquisite and respectable, as does all the dumb bending over with ass out in the videos. My defense of "Amoled" is that it's a phone commercial, and you know on mobiles the sound is tinny, ditto the song, which incorporates the old tin of science fiction past.

During last year's T-ara War I was often wondering who all these people were, the commenters, the battlers. I made guesses (that most were in their teens or twenties, most were female) that I can't confirm; also wondered what countries they were posting from. I was watching the ones who posted in English, which I knew was an international language among Asians in East Asia, as well as among Europeans and North Americans, for communication across borders or — in places like the Philippines and Singapore — across ethnicities and language groupings. Usefully, hyotheleader, one of T-ara's staunchest and effective defenders last August (she* did the hard work of going through faked and out-of-context videos and photos and detailing exactly how they were bogus), has a flag counter appended to her Tumblr (lower right corner), which you can click to get much greater detail. Of course, that's just one person's Tumblr, it's skewed towards T-ara fans, obviously, since it's mostly devoted to reblogs of Hyomin pictures and gifs, and it'll skew towards followers from where Tumblr is most prominent and towards whatever reader trends accumulate on the basis of who started following her early and whom she started following early. Also, not everyone in a country is from that country.** Here are the numbers from a few days ago:

United States 14.9%
Thailand 13.7%
Malaysia 11.1%
Singapore 8.6%
Indonesia 7.9%
Vietnam 5.4%
South Korea 5.1%
Philippines 4.1%
Taiwan 3.0%
Canada 2.7%
Australia 2.1%
China 1.7%
Hong Kong 1.5%
United Kingdom 1.5%
Others 16.5%

( Åland )

*I have to use a pronoun so I'm going with my guess that hyotheleader is a she, based on my feeling about her tone of voice. But I've no actual evidence of her gender.

( Estimating gender from fan chants )

Mark, or someone, why is the harmonic minor scale called the harmonic minor scale? How is it any more harmonic than the natural minor scale? Wikip:

"One More Day" is composed in the key of A harmonic minor, meaning though in A minor, it has a G#, an accidental, at the end of the chorus and the end of the second verse. The vocals span around an octave and a half, from C4 to E5. It is written in verse-chorus form, with a bridge section in a rap-form, featuring Sung Hyo Ram from XCROSS as the guest rapper, before the last repeated chorus.

Watch on YouTube

Wikip explains "harmonic" in the name like this:

The scale is so named because it is a common foundation for harmonies (chords) used in a minor key. For example, in the key of A minor, the V chord (the triad built on the note E) is normally a major triad that includes the raised seventh degree of the scale: G♯, as opposed to the unraised G♮ which would make a minor triad.

What confuses me about this explanation is that it assumes that, if your i is a minor, then V is somehow more "harmonic" than v is. (That is, that the major chord that's a fifth above the chord that establishes the key is, when the key is minor, more "harmonic" than the minor chord that's the fifth above the original chord.) Now I get that Wikip is saying that the major V is more "normal" or "common" than the minor v. (Where? Among whom?) Is that because it's — somehow — more harmonically related? Is it because of that "leading-tone" business Wikip mentions?

Here's a natural (rather than harmonic) minor for the v, which sounds fine to me:

( Sistar Zukie )

Yes, I'm never likely to master music theory. Other stuff is taking my time.

Another reason for this post is that you — especially you who are named "Mark" — may enjoy the ChoColat track for how its harpsichord and melody recall the classic She'kspere/Kandi days of TLC, Destiny's Child, and Pink. Maybe you, more than I, will be able to explain what the melody has in common with those melodies of yore (if I'm right that it does).

Korean girl group Sistar begin their latest single with this arresting couplet:

"I don't wanna cry
Destroy my eyes."

At least that's how a few people heard it on the Jukebox. Great line, even if it's not what Hyorin was actually saying.

Here's the vid, if you'd like to mishear for yourself.



(We also talked about "Alone" on a "Volume Up" thread.)

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I think of Shinsadong Tiger tracks as catchy and spare, with some interesting musical countermotions but not overstuffed with them. 4minute's "Hot Issue" is a brilliant example (to be talked about in some later post), and is one of five or so tracks in the running for Frank's Favorite K-pop Track Ever. 4minute's new one, "Volume Up," feels like a radical departure: it's ambitious, it's full of stuff — stuff tumbling over other stuff — and it fucks radically with song form. Or at least it feels as if it's fucking with its form. I said to myself, "Shinsadong Tiger is fucking with us severely." And I sat down to diagram the thing, to figure out the game he was playing, and I went, "Hmmm, well some parts repeat, and if you call this the prechorus, and what comes after it the chorus, well…" And what I came up with was:

Verse → Chorus → Verse → Chorus → Middle Eight → Break → Chorus

Which is to say it's standard as fuck, doesn't screw with song structure at all. Except, I still think he's screwing with us. For one thing, the part I ended up calling the "prechorus" is a crescendo, and its effect when it first comes along is to make you think, or feel (since you don't put it into words),"OK, this cancels everything before it, makes that all prelude or preface or intro, and what comes after is the song proper; so here we go, we're starting with the verse." And what comes next sounds like a verse, rumbling along jaunty and energetic but not trying for a payoff — except it's the first section of what I've labeled "Chorus," above, in order to ram the song into verse-chorus format. Another peculiarity, which helped send my perception of form into confusion, is that several parts of the song end with a high-pitched wailing vocal that keeps going, soaring above and then spilling into the next part of the song. And what end up actually functioning as payoffs are recurring motifs (I'm calling them "motifs" rather than "riffs" or "hooks" because, as I said, the song feels ambitious — which doesn't mean it's not totally the opposite of grim; it doesn't carry a sign on it that says "funny," since it's not a joke song; but there's a deadpan playfulness, sending itself, without officially winking at us, over the top), for instance, a number of "oh oh oh oh ohs" and "eh eh eh eh ehs" declaimed by the group as if they were comic operetta singers out on parole, fanning out across the countryside (in the video, the women of 4minute are stationed in a medieval castle or cathedral, dressed in motley colors, as visual antigoths, I suppose; but when hearing the music I envision them traveling fields and hills and hamlets, serenading an uneasy populace and perplexing the local constabulary) and fanning out across the song as well, the variously cascading "ahs" and "ehs" and "ohs" recurring in different melodies in different sections. In addition, we've got a muted sax playing a moody, pensive line at song's start and then reappearing in the chorus but this time as the exuberant splash at the end of one of the spillover vocal wails I mentioned earlier.

Watch on YouTube

( Pun, another diagram, genius )

Live version of "Just Follow," with Zico in place of DOK2; HyunA's relative stillness makes her as steamy as ever, and Zico just kills. His rap in the middle is entirely new, and he improves on the original.

Rapping, and this slow tempo, suit HyunA well. She's digging in, sounding hard and wounded; meanwhile, her sensuousness operates on its own accord, drifts along with the music, a force field that saturates the room.



Don't know if the ban on the "Bubble Pop!" video and on its live dance routine influenced this performance. She's in pants this time, not panties or minis, and she doesn't thrust her pelvis a lot. And this works fine.

( Questions about South Korean censorship )

( Zico and Block B )