Back to Site Table of Contents
(written November 2, 2023)
BTS was a gateway drug.
I’ve been overdosing on boyband K-pop for the past several days. I’m late to the party, as always, but that turns out to be an advantage, since now I have approximately eight billion new (to me) songs to listen to and create a new playlist for my power walks.
And I do mean POWER walks.
I’ve been listening to the same old playlists for years, and this new
music is driving me so hard on these walks, I could plow right through a
tree. I’ve learned a lot about K-pop. For example:
It’s not just fluffy dance pop. I found dramatic, almost gothic rock. I found sophisti-pop. I found wild, primal music that makes you want to build a campfire in the woods and dance around it in a pagan ceremony. I found aggressive and infectious rap/hip-hop. Just like American popular music, K-pop is all over the map.
The “pop” in K-pop could also be short for
“population,” as some of these boybands have enough members to start a new
country. I don’t know how anyone gets
paid. With some bands, the number of
members varies from video to video, depending on who got fired because of a
scandal or is refusing to show up because they’re suing the label or just
overslept on the day of shooting.
The largest group I found online is Neo Culture Technology (NCT) with 23
members. The group Seventeen was
supposed to have seventeen members, but by the time they had their debut, they only
had thirteen members, so they just went with it and didn’t bother changing the
name. I’ve been told this actually
happens a lot in K-pop.
K-pop bands have a huge linguistic advantage in
songwriting. They switch back and forth
between Korean and English in the same song, sometimes in the same lyric. If they can’t find a word to rhyme in Korean,
they just switch to English and find the rhyme there. I have to be honest – I think that’s brilliant.
Throw in the fact that some of these bands also sing in Japanese or Mandarin,
and if you can’t find a rhyme for your Korean lyric in three other languages,
then the problem is you.
As for the bands themselves, here are my favorites so far:
EXO
This is the group that started it all for me. Some variations of this group are called EXO
M, EXO-CBX, EXO-SC or EXO K, but I don’t know why because I don’t
care. I randomly clicked on their video
for “MAMA” and was gobsmacked. So
dramatic and powerful. It what the
original cast of Jesus Christ Superstar would sound like if they made a K-pop song. Yes, it’s got a great dance beat, but it’s a
stomping dance beat that could cause an earthquake. When I’m out walking and that song comes on,
I feel like I could speed-walk all the way to the Florida Keys.
I started watching all their other videos, and they have a song with a similar vibe called “Monster” that I have listened to, by conservative estimate, 58 billion times in the past two weeks. I have been watching Netflix and realized that I haven’t listened to “Monster” in almost an hour, so I have PUT MY SHOW ON PAUSE so I can pick up my phone and listen to it again before resuming the show.
EXO also has more upbeat dance pop songs, but they don’t let up on the intensity with those. They have songs like “Call Me Baby” and “Love Me Right” that may be lighter in tone, but the music is still powerful enough to fuel every car running on the planet at the same time.
The only bummer about this group is they take themselves a
bit too seriously. The original video
for “MAMA” has a nearly two-minute Lord of the Rings-style intro with a Morgan
Freeman-style narrator saying things like, “When the skies and the grounds were
one, the legends through their twelve forces nurtured the tree of life.” While CGI footage of trees and lightning and
storms play on the screen, the narrator drones on about a red force and evil and
the overturning of time, and it is so bewildering that even the group’s most
passionate fans have edited and re-posted the video with the words “WITHOUT
NARRATION” in the title.
Their concert video on YouTube (recorded in Japan) takes that opening narration and blows it up into something that a coked-up David Lynch would tell them to tone down. Before the band takes the stage, the audience is subject to an opening video that runs a full seven minutes. The narrator is a child’s voice this time. The individual band members are shown superimposed over scenes of CGI-created tornados whirling ten feet away while their hair just ruffles slightly. Their images are inserted into old photographs, as if they have been with us since the dawn of time. The child’s voice implies that mankind is awful, and this band is here to save us from ourselves, presumably through the messages of their hit songs “Cream Soda” and “Ko Ko Bop.”
As the video goes on, we see band members levitating over a lake, walking across a desert in a monk’s robe, standing on glaciers, surviving direct lightning strikes, and for some incomprehensible reason, comforting a bewildered-looking Caucasian child who appears to be locked in a basement. The child narrator mercifully ends the video with “And now, it’s time to tell you where they are,” which is surprising because I assumed the band was stuck in traffic, which is why they were showing us this video.
I couldn’t help laughing at this pomposity, most likely because I’m a cynical adult and not one of the devoted fans in the crowd screaming through the whole concert video intro. And honestly, I kid this band because I love them. Their concert was certainly worth the seven-minute wait. Mankind is still terrible, and the band members still haven’t saved us from ourselves, but at least they’re giving us some amazing music to enjoy while we wait for the earth to crash directly into the sun.
Other bands keeping us dancing until the apocalypse…
2pm
Here is our sophisti-pop.
My favorite of their songs I’ve heard so far is “Make It,” and it’s
jazzy and cool and playful and I love it so much.
This song also features what I initially thought was a lyrical glitch suggesting that English is not their first language, and I found it adorable. It’s in the second verse, where they sing about the things they want to do to sweep a beautiful woman off her feet:
Coffee, shopping, driving,
LP, cooking, wine, are you down?
I know this is my Grammar OCD talking, but
I love how they give us a series of gerund verbs and then throw in the nouns
“coffee” and “wine.” But what’s even
weirder is the “LP” part. When I first
heard it, I thought he was saying “helping” and just chalked it up to him
looking for a 2-syllable word to scan in English. But all the lyric sites say it’s “LP.” I searched all over Google, and the closest I
could find is that South Korea has a lot of LP bars, which are trendy places to
drink while listening to vinyl albums. (And
as it turns out, at least two of the band members are fluent in English, so
they knew what they were doing.)
Fun fact about one guy in the group, Nichkhun. He was born and raised in California to Thai
Chinese parents and didn’t learn Korean until several years later when he got
recruited into K-pop. The K-pop machine
even recruits in the United States.
Monsta
X
My God with this group.
When I first heard their song “Alligator,” I thought I was listening to
EXO. But no. Monsta X is EXO without the long-winded
intros and with the most incredible dancing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know bodies could move that
way. They jump high and spin and move in
unison in a way that human beings should not be able to do without slamming
into each other. The choreography is
precise but feels spontaneous. The
aggressively sexual lyrics are a perfect match for the way they move. “Alligator” and “Hero” are two of their songs
that I have also paused Netflix shows to listen to when I’m going through
withdrawal. When their wild pagan-sounding
“Follow” comes up on the playlist during my power walks, I take up the entire
sidewalk. All the space is MINE. If you don’t like it, I will set you on fire.
RIIZE
So I click randomly on a K-pop YouTube suggestion, and the
first lyric I hear is “If you want something to play with, get a guitar,” and I
do a spit-take with my root beer. This is not the usual intro I get from K-pop
idols. It’s not about girls. It’s about the love of music.
I mean, later it’s about girls. They sing about how
they love dancing with a girl, but a solid 90% of the song is about being in
love with music and how it makes them feel to play it. But what I love most, besides that opening
line, are the layered harmonies that are absolute heaven. It’s a dream.
The whole song is playful and fun and refreshingly innocent, and I want
it playing on an endless loop at my funeral because no one will be able to stay sad for long.
CRAVITY
The song I love most so far is called “Adrenaline.” It’s filled with the same joy of RIIZE’s “Get
a Guitar” in a way that makes me think of the Jackson Five. It’s
summer and happiness and love. “Break
All The Rules” is more rock-sounding but still joyful and fun. These guys are just fun. ‘Nuff said.
This is just the beginning. As I subscribe to more and more band and label channels on YouTube, I’m seeing music videos that are just blowing my mind. The title of this blog, “Catch Me Hello,” comes from “Love Song” by BigBang, one of the most beautifully painful songs I’ve ever heard. I’ve been missing out on so much. I can’t wait to find more of what I’ve been missing and build up my K-pop power-walking playlist.
Speaking of which, apologies in advance if you see me out walking and I slam right into you. K-pop is a serious drug.
Back to Site Table of Contents
No comments:
Post a Comment