It’s time for Kpopalypse roundup! Let’s take a look at some new releases!
An exceedingly slow week due to Lunar New Year celebrations in Korea, but Kpopalypse is still here to cover all that matters!
Jennie & Dominic Fike – Love Hangover
Unlike her last song that was agressively shithouse, Jennie’s new random token western collab is just plain uninteresting. At least they got Jennie’s look right this time, and as Tiktok users know, how something looks is always far most important than anything else, so perhaps this is actually song of the year.
IVE – Attitude
Silly me, I forgot, there’s actually THREE types of IVE songs: “I Am” clones, left-field weird-assness, and “let’s rip off some popular western song from decades ago as the hook”. In this case Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” gets an IVEification, and… well, it’s the wrong choice quite frankly, but oh well, can’t win ’em all.
Yoyomi – So Pretty
A particularly annoying chant segue is really the only thing wrong with Yoyomi’s stab at Orange Caramel style disco trot-pop.
Minnie feat. Ten – Obsession
Probably the worst offender in Shure 55 use yet, Minnie spends most of the video here pointing her microphone directly at the floor. However Ten gets it perfect at 2:13, making him the first artist on SM Entertainment to actually know how to use one – could he have not told her how? Or is it just coincidence that he had it around the right way? Research will continue.
Minnie – Cherry Sky
Meanwhile Minnie’s other song has no microphones in the video and not much else of note either.
PLAVE – Dash
Definitely a case of a visual/audio mismatch, the sci-fi nonsense in the video doesn’t mesh with the blues nonsense in the song at all.
Hong Jinyoung – Flirting
Somehow Yoyomi got the good trot song this week and Hong Jin Young got the thoughtless garbage with the eyesore cartoon video.
Eunhyuk – Up N Down
The down part is that it’s just the usual early 90s musical template that we’re all totally bored of by now, but the up part is you get to see Shindong dance.
TRENDZ – Bad Enough
Accurate song title of the week.
Luminous – I’m Red
Not to be confused with the boy group also called “Luminous”, someone in this poverty-stricken agency noticed that a few idols here and there looked okay with shorter hair so they decided to splash out the big bucks on wigs for the whole team. Not sure why they didn’t match the colour with the bicycle gloves, I guess the red ones were on special.
Solji – La Festa
Hey EXID girl, why are you holding the lyrics sheet in your hand? There’s literally a music stand right there, who not put the paper on the music stand so it doesn’t make paper noises while you sing and mess up the recording. If you can’t read the words just move the stand a bit closer, it’s fine… oh, you’re miming? Okay, well, carry on I guess.
Keigo – Banana
I guess a banana is probably a helpful tool for JOI.
Genick, Jacotanu, The Deep – Gasoline
I’m really liking this trend of The Deep making actual music lately, it’s great. I don’t know if she started taking drugs or stopped taking drugs, but whatever changed, definitely keep it up.
Ashley Alisha – Hopeless Romantic
Nice groove, but a groove is not a substitute for a song. You’d think a k-pop producer like her would save the best songs for herself but I guess not.
Blue Jamong – The Giving Stump
If you want to see claymation of a guy sucking two cocks at the same time, just go to about 1:35 and this video has got you covered.
Min Jiwoon – Someone
Someone linked me some songs from last year I missed, and I ignored them all for this roundup because I skipped over them last year for a good reason, but I thought I’d cover Min Jiwoon because I didn’t deliberately skip this one, I just didn’t know it existed. SM sure are doing her dirty, spending no promotional effort on her whatsoever, to the point where not only did both I and my song submitter miss this song when it came out, but none of my thousands of readers even noticed it was missing except the one reader who alerted me to it. I mean the song is boring as fuck so I can understand why nobody cared, but I have a feeling that even if it was decent it still would have floated under everyone’s radar because SM are too busy preparing to push their new answer to the “we have NewJeans at home” trend to give her a little promo. I honestly feel sorry for her, imagining inking a deal with the “leaders in neo-culture technology” and thinking “now I’ve made it in the business finally” just to then feel like you’re being ghosted.
Siha feat. Jintae – One Love
It’s a sad week in k-pop when someone you’ve never heard of has one of those rap/vocal ballad things and it’s better than most of the features.
Superbee, Lil Gimchi, Oxynova – 2:08
A rare rap video where the motion of the camera will make you throw up quicker than the song.
ShyboiiTobii feat. Jin Dogg, Foggyatthebottom – No Look
I did quite a lot of research into the adult club scene in Korea before I wrote the Shin Hana book series, so I could get the details of the various types of sex work establishments in those books to accurately reflect the reality of how that industry actually operates in Korea. While checking with various contacts, they hotly denied that the western-style strip club with pole-dancing and lap-dancing was much of a thing in Korea, and talked extensively about the various ways in which Korean sex work was in fact quite different. So are these rap guys just cosplaying, or did they fly themselves out to some other country for this, or is everyone just lying to me? Perhaps it’s like Starbucks in Australia where they don’t really exist much at all but there’s a very few isolated ones who cater to foreigners too scared to try anything different when they come to the country.
Junoflo – Maze
Another drunk cameraperson in a rap video. Maybe because it’s cold he’s just trying to move around more to warm up a bit.
Confined White – Spark
This rock band wasn’t very exciting so let’s have our non-Korean LGBT feature here instead, yay! This week it’s Tyler The Creator, and I never had much time for Odd Future as a group but I think he’s sometimes great solo, as he is here. Inquiring minds want to know though, does he meet required BADING standards? He certainly does if his freestyle is anything to go by, I honestly can’t see someone dead straight in the rap world making up lyrics like that if they weren’t at least bi – not even as a joke, given how humourless and scared other rappers have always been about addressing gayness and fluid sexuality in general. Back when rap was all about homophobia I always dreamed of a day where there’s be hardcore rap that sounded HARD and had explicit lyrics as extreme as anything else out there… but was gay. Gangster rap that didn’t sound like Samwell, but sounded tough, with “suck my dick” lyrics except they were talking about guys sucking it, and unironically. Sex raps like 2 Live Crew but male on male. Tyler gets as close to that as I’ve ever seen.
YNG KURT – Comet
Back to Korea and okay that’s enough Autotune rap nonsense, jesus christ.
RANDOM BONUS VIDEOS OF THE WEEK
SM Entertainment have NewJeans at home
I’m cynical of course, but an SM Entertainment version of Min Hee Jin’s current output with less of the conceptual multimedia savvy but also with her usual pedophile-pandering turned down to acceptable levels… might actually work. I mean it is SM Entertainment after all so there’s a good chance they’ll find a way to fuck it up, but who knows, there’s an outside chance that they just might get it right. Enjoy cringing at this awful, awful concept film which really does show how far Min Hee Jin is ahead of her imitators.
21skirr!!bo!! X RAY$V – SKI!iI!i
Here’s the song I was talking about in the header image, some useless album track that everyone would have probably ignored. As you can hear it’s total shit so everyone please bow down and thank ILLIT five times per day every day just for existing and ridding us of garbage like this.
Baby V.O.X – Yayaya
T-ara might have paved the way for many things in k-pop, but one thing they definitely didn’t poineer was having a crap song nobody wants to listen to called “Yayaya”. Sporting terrible production which reduces half of the vocals to a bland wispy mumble, this type of rubbish was par for the course back in late 90s Korean idol pop where even the biggest groups weirdly hadn’t discovered vocal compression yet. Mind you even a production makeover probably couldn’t have saved what is honestly a pretty unexciting song that just sort of plods along with its kindergarten-grade beat doing not much of interest.
That’s all for this week! Kpopalypse roundup returns next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment