 | Now, every year I make a big fuss about how Billboard's year-end chart, which promises to take a look at every single song produced, period, completely ignores anything that came out of Asia. And every year when I go to make my own comprehensive chart, I remember why they ignore half the world... a lot of things happen that just don't seem important. I need to take about a week every year catching up on the music that slipped by my attention in the West while I was fixated on the East. The obvious solution here is to make it so that there's one epic universal chart, but that's insanely impractical, for now. So, I'm compensating with my own version of the US Hot 100, keeping it pretty region-specific and going by release dates so I don't have to waste time making all of those tricky evaluative judgements. ^_~ Here are my Top 22 US Releases: |  |
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Sweet Shisus how did I miss this? I may be more than a bit biased towards loving this song (it was the first song I ever had to choreograph on my own. It was part of my special high school education {the IB program required us to log hours as an active contributor to some sort of sport. Some people lead like legit sports teams to league championships. I jumped around in sweatpants and played with a sound board and innocent lives} and I will forever be fond of it), but even if that weren't so, I'd have to say that these guys do a fantastic job with this track. Seriously. It's a GORGEOUS cover. And now I'm craving an LC9 comeback that includes King R&B solo, possibly even in English. I'm also hoping for a solo for Rasa, or maybe a duet between the two of them. And E.Den's lower vocals balance the smoothe highs out so perfectly. J.Hyo, AO, and Jun are such cuties and their voices mellow it out adding soft middle tones that rough the track up in just the right ways, especially with the short rap in Korean. It changes up the rhythms brilliantly. New fantasy kpo team here, I want subgroup promotions. Rasa, King, and E.Den on a smoothe R&B track and then J.Hyo, AO, & Jun on a kickin dance track that has them playin gangsters or super spies. Or Nega Network could mix the two ideas and give me one complete LC9 comeback, I'm down for either. Honestly, with the variety of voices adding depth of meaning to the universalizing question "have you ever loved somebody" . . . I kinda like this one better. Their voices are spectacular and their producers are Top-Class. And the MV, though quite obviously made on a budget of negative ten bucks, is pretty fantastic on it's own account. It's really quite well done. The transitions between members, the slides along notes, and cuts at the cadence; it's all the result of great planning and great editing. The lighting is a little awkward at times, and the transitions between warm and cool colors are a bit abrupt, but still phenomenal job. This right here his how you make your own MV (granted the camera they used probably cost more than my house, but hey, that why you make cool friends with people in cool places). I give it a 9/10: Blissful!
A Party Song with Punch. I LOVE this track, and the MV that goes with it, though I can see easily how it wouldn't do terribly well with a wide swath of the Kpop fandom. It's a very nitty gritty track, in a genre that's relatively new to the Kpop scene, the the MV isn't the typical flashy smoothe thing a fan would expect (especially from TaeYang). However, that's exactly why I like it so much. There's a sort of sterilized underworld image that's broken onto the scene lately with bands like Block B, B.A.P, and Bangtan Boys throwing out weird 'gangsta' themed promotionals. GD & TOP have always been outliers with their craziness, and they are excused for their strangeness by the Fandom simply because they're GD & TOP, but TaeYang is regarded more like a mainstream Kpop and held to rather sterilized standards of nitty-gritty weirdness. TaeYang's cleverly circumvented that issue by having GD compose the song, but now people are criticizing it as being a GD-Clone Vid. That's unfortunate, but understandable. I mean, even the first time I heard the track I though it sounded like it was how Coup D'Etat was meant to be (especially in the styling, the styling was straight from GD's MV, though I have to say I think TaeYang pulled it off better, looking more like a dramatic villain and less like a crack head). But really, upon giving it several dozen 'second-listens', it doesn't even feel like a GD track so much as feels like it could have been odd enough for him. It fits TaeYang's vocals very well and I thought that hearing him rap was interesting. I don't particularly like how his voice handles a few of the sections, but all of the melodic rap and the powerful vamp sections are just beautiful. The track moves along brilliantly and in all honesty, GD wouldn't sound half as good as TaeYang were he to perform it. I love that it shows a different side of the Korean underground than most 'underworld' MVs: it gets into the city-scum ideas, showing a dramatic F-You, middle finger raised to authority, sort of rave rather than the glamorous underground parties of videos like Go And Tell Them, or Beautiful. It's also not the obviously set-up-on-a-stage sort of MV that No More Dream was or MaMaBeat or even Warrior. It's a party for the hell of it that's not prettied up, with plenty of aggression to go with it. But it's also gorgeously smoothe, presenting this sort of alternative lifestyle as something that isn't objectionable or problematic, just different. It moves sweetly through gorgeous images of the fires and sunset scenes and promotes passion and fun as the main motivators while still being down and dirty in the streets. All in all I really love it, and I think it's a shame there was no active plot to speak of (particularly as the DeLorean scenes weren't actually all that necessary or relevent . . . ). I Give it a 9/10: Blissful!
It Blows Me Away . . . Topp Dogg is a dark-horse, joining the rookie-race late in the game and at a huge disadvantage, and even so, they're making one hell of a run at at winning my vote for rookies of the year. Sweet Shisus, it's been a while since I've gotten so worked up over a debut. I meant to review this forever ago, but I've wanted to sit down with it and really explain why it's fantastic, but finals have been brutal (not to self, don't take 21 classes again. It's really just a bad idea). I was leery of them at first, "hiphop SuJu" did not sound like the sort of moniker filled with promise. (Also, yes their name is stupid. BUT, out of all the spellings for it they could have picked, the extra p and d aren't the worst choices ever: in terms of search indexing, it's easy for people to remember and a rather rare tag typo, if you're searching 'topp dogg' the odds are pretty dang high that you'll get this band as opposed to some Bro who got points in something stupid #brofest #top dog). Thirteen is a LOT of names to learn, a lot of personalities to discover, a lot of quirks to get used to... Some members will undoubtedly be left out of the major spolight moments, and I was not surprised to find that issue cropping up here. However, considering that there's only 4min of footage here to get to know these kids in, I managed to do it pretty well. They've thrown in some of the most spectacular choreography of the year and it spins everyone to the front at least once and at least long enough to find a feature to help ID them. Within a week of first seeing this, I knew eleven of their names perfectly. With SuJu, it took me months to learn them. I don't have any idea what people are talking about when they say that Stardom doesn't know how to film thirteen members as well as SM does. SM's film-caps of SuJu are just plain awful, wide shots that manage to include all of the members in a single shot aren't worth anything if the members are so tiny and uniform they can only be picked out by experts. Stardom captured these boy perfectly: in smaller bursts that allow for feature recognition and with some group shots that were packed tight enough to allow that feature recognition to operate. And even more so, the pre-fabricated sub-groups was a brilliant card to play. Grouping them into Dragon, Lion, Knight, and Wizard, and then giving each group a batch of linked distinctive features helped categorize the members to make for easier learning. If you could ID three lions, but not the fourth, it would be much easier to look him up than if you couldn't ID the last three suit-clad SuJu members. It's a really well-played card and I applaud Stardom's use of it. Installing the idea of subgroups before making them active promotional units makes the idea of learning all of them significantly less intimidating (assurance that it'll get easier can work miracles). I will admit that the shaky-cam thing bothered me a bit, but it's honestly not that bad. The real rub that bothered me was the odd filter most of it had layered in (especially all of the cuts inside the warehouse). That made it blurry and that is why the shaky-cam bothered me: there wasn't enough fine detail to latch onto while the camera shook.
More about the distinct roles: It wasn't just the choreography. All the members that had a verse to sing or their own rap to spit had a fantastically unique style of doing so. Kidoh's voice is nice and smoothe, Atom's and Jenissi's are unique and easily recognizable, and Yano is one hell of an impressive rapper . . . all of which I picked up on the very first listen-through. A lot of people have been complaining about the autotune. I'll admit there's a lot of it, but I don't really have a problem with it. Sure, it's ironic that the song is about standing above the others in the Kpop game and they're using exactly the same tricks as everyone else, but I like to think of it more as ironic than unfortunate. It could be seen as a statement, that to win they game you have to start by playing by the rules . . . that's probably not the intention of it, but hey, I'd like to think it could be. Other than that, the MV didn't have a self-contained story with an active plot, so it is barred from getting a full 10 points, but it was still an utterly epic debut and I'm looking forward to what else these boys have to show. Supposedly they're getting ready for another album (mostly self-composed and produced, so that doesn't sound like it's referring to their upcoming repackaged album...). With their follow-up coming out in just a few more days, sub-groups on the table to be utilized at some point here, and the year quickly running out, it'll be interesting to see what they have to show us. I for one am super excited and, depending on what happens before New Year's, Topp Dogg might just make my 2013 Baby Band list. I Give it a 9/10: Blissful!
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