koganbot

Tom posts this in quotes as his hed, gives his response, including this:

It's a cry which goes up vs boring writing sometimes but it's a standard nothing else I can think of gets held to. Writing about film should feel like a film, writing about sports should feel like sports, writing about memes should LOL W/EV, writing about dance etc etc

I've never seen anyone promulgate this standard for writing about pop, not stated like that, anyway. (Was it on some blog last week?) Probably never saw it stated like that — as a requirement — about any music, actually. But I certainly felt it when writing about rock 'n' roll back in my young days. That someone might have said it about current pop makes me happy, despite my nondesire to make my writing feel like Bruno Mars. Maybe someone feels about pop the way people once felt about rock 'n' roll! Feels that it makes demands on its adherents, that it has a promise that you need live up to.

So, writing about pop should be as _________ as pop is! What can go in the blank? Many things? If pop is setting a standard, what is that standard?

I can't believe that Tom and the 24 people who clicked "like" have no idea why writing about pop or about rock 'n' roll or about disco or rave or jazz (as opposed to sports or film) might be subject to a vision or standard or ideal that pop or rock 'n' roll or disco or rave or jazz itself sets.*

Tom again:

You certainly don't need writing about pop to feel like pop when there's such an insane deluge of pop around

Why are you so certain?

Dave quoted me quoting Meltzer (mid 1970s) saying "I'd write like Bo Diddley rather than about him," which is Meltzer misrepresenting himself a bit. I'm sure Meltzer disbelieves in the like/about dichotomy. He's not a dichotomy kind of guy. But I did pose a question to myself, when I first read it: If Bo Diddley is already being Bo Diddley, why do we need Meltzer to write like Bo Diddley? There are some potentially interesting answers. You've got to be willing to ask the question. I gave something of an answer near the end of "Presentation Of Self," though I don't have a copy of Real Punks handy so I can't quote it. My review of A Whore Just Like The Rest may give a smatter of what I think were Meltzer's reasons. ("Meltzer also... aspired to the mind of rock 'n' roll, chose rock 'n' roll as his intellectual activity.... And if the rock 'n' roll mind had gone dead in the music — pertinence now seemed to stay where it was told — pertinence could still be anywhere he wanted on his page.") And I tossed a few half-articulate ideas on Dave's comment thread: "What might be at stake is that where criticism and analysis go, Bo Diddley isn't welcome, even among readers who are delighted to hear Bo Diddley on the player. Also implies, though, that criticism and analysis can travel where music can't."

*Not that I have to accept the vision, standard, ideal, etc. The judgment's mine to make, not the genre's. But if T-ara is making interesting demands, I'd like to think I might try to live up to them.

[UPDATE: The word "feel" in "writing like pop should feel like pop" isn't the most interesting word in the world. "Pop" isn't either, actually. In any event, K-pop, rock, rave, dancehall etc. do a lot more than just make people feel things.]

My brother, Richard, says I'm right in insisting that the third chord in "Heart And Soul" is ii not IV. This pertains to a discussion I had somewhere with Dave (on a "Friday" comment thread, I believe). I think that if you play IV rather than ii it's just not "Heart And Soul."

Embedding this just because I think it's brilliantly great, and to see if it gets a rise out of arbitrary_greay. Also, the Dead Lester thread is getting close to where LiveJournal does that horrible thing of collapsing subthreads on us, so if you have any more responses to what's on that thread, I suggest you do so on this one.

Not going to get into a lot of football talk here, but two things struck me yesterday about Peter King's MMQB Tuesday Edition. First is this sentence. "I am thinking about the game, and about all the head trauma, and I need to do some more thinking about whether it's in anyone's long-term interests to play this game." Powerful statement from someone whose writing career has revolved around football. He does go on to say that more players than not seem to do well after football. My few not particularly profound thoughts:

Problems with football go way beyond head trauma. The exploitation of college athletes, who willingly line up for the exploitation; the way football distorts college life. And I'm aware that regarding any of these issues someone could knowledgeably argue that football does more good than harm. I'd say, and I think King would say, that even if that's true, that's no excuse for letting the harm it does continue. Which doesn't mean I think the sport shouldn't continue. It will continue no matter what I think, anyway.

Also, for all I know Junior Seau — a retired football star who just committed suicide, generally described as a bubbly, enthusiastic presence on the field and in life, though hard-hitting during the game — might have had something hurting him in his pyche from early childhood, and football may have kept him alive far longer than if he'd had no football. We're assuming head trauma or the inability to cope with life after stardom. These are not bad assumptions, but we'll likely never know. Even if the brain autopsy turns up something serious, that won't definitively tell us why he shot himself. But the suicide coming at the time it does, it's contributing to what's starting to look like a sea change in attitude.

Second thing that struck me was the total disconnect between the uplifting, feel-good tone of the first part of the column, about Eric LeGrand, the paralyzed former Rutgers football player who, in a really kind gesture from his ex-coach, has been made a member of the Tampa Bay Bucs, and then the rest of the column, with the continuing fallout from Seau and the Saints bounty scandal, etc.

Fwiw, when I think T-ara I do think football, a little bit, though I know that any comparison I'm making is facile. I'm aware, and I've said, that "social analysts, especially in journalism but also in academia, often enough come in with an attitude of concern for children and with the desire to protect supposedly vulnerable audiences and vulnerable young performers; and, while the concern may be genuine, the analyses end up as simpleminded, hamfisted expressions of the writers' social and class prejudices, the writers not even knowing that these are prejudices." But that obviously doesn't mean nothing's distorted or distorting in pop, or that no one's getting hurt. Again, for me to say so is just a commonplace. But has anyone's analysis along these lines gotten much beyond the commonplace?

In part one I'd charted "a frequent version of verse-chorus form" as follows, saying that this was the form of "Volume Up":

( chart )



It actually starts with an introduction, where we get the muted sax sample, and what I was calling the "break" was just the second half of the middle eight. Teasing out the parts:

0:00 Intro: muted, moody sax, sets the serious tone that the song will subsequently embellish, lampoon, demolish, reassert, etc., meanwhile, underneath, a keyboard suggests a dance and a counterrhythm → 0:16 1st part of verse: HyunA lays out the predicament but also ends each line with a flourish of staccato syllables, "naw-aw aw-aw-aw, naw-aw aw-aw-aw," "heh-eh eh-eh-eh, wah-ah ah-ah-ah" that, while not being out-and-out parody, are amusing enough to detach HyunA from the anguish that the music is pretending to establish (I'm at a loss to convey how good this is/she is: I imagine her singing each syllable with an vertically oval open mouth while making her eyes as round as her mouth, in faux innocence); reading this socially, I'd say that the operatic syllables signal the song's ambitiousness but that the actual sound comes from comic opera, so creates a sense of incipient hilarity → 0:29 2nd part of verse: GaYoon does a couple of vocal descents, not too heavily but with the pang and heat that reminds us there is some angsty young-and-in-unhappy-love business here; back in the mix, piano continues hopping along, readying us for the dance → 0:45 prechorus: GaYoon carries over from the previous part with a long note, something between a wail and a canopy, with HyunA returning, down at ground level, now as a rapper, pushy and tough and teasing and beneficently benign all at once, the music pounding and rising in a slate-cleaning crescendo, "everybody, TIME TO ROCK" → 0:59 chorus: JiYoon grabs the banner as the pounding boshbeat rides us across the battlefield; this doesn't feel like a cathartic chorus so much as the song launching itself forward, JiYoon amplifying the emotion and jabbing us with some savage "eh-eh eh-ehs" of her own → 1:15 second part of chorus: and like GaYoon before her, JiYoon launches herself atop the proceedings and splashes down on the moody sax that mellows us out a little, while a singer — I'm not sure who — pulls some syllabic "oh oh oh-oh ohs" off the grill and starts juggling them to remind us of opera and joy and open-mouthed emotion.

( Second verse more or less same as the first )

Which brings us to → 2:43 middle eight: for four bars we've got JiHyun delicately wandering parks and fields, the melody doing the venture-to-distant-chords-and-return thing that I tried to understand back in college but never did; rest of 4minute do something that's probably formal or choral or ???? enough to be called "polyphony"; next four bars are the same except with the sax taking JiHyun's place and being more diffuse and less appealing → ( stuff about lyrics )

( song form and Hot Issue )

Comment Of The Day:

KPOP FANS SHOWED TODAY HOW DISGUSTING AND SICK THEY ARE!!! THEY ARE HITLERS!!!
I WALKED NICELY ON THE STREET WHEN CRAP FELL ON MY HEAD! I LOOKED UP AND SAW 3 BASTARDAS SCREAMING 2NE1'S POWER!!!
IT WAS SO DUSGUSTING! I STRTED TO CRY!
HOW UNPOLITE THEY ARE!!! KPOP FANS ARE SCUMS THAT DON'T DESERVE OUR AIR!
BUT THIS GAVE ME STRANTH TO CONTINUE MY FIGHT AGAINST BAD MUSIC!
JUSTIN BIEBET SHOULD BE PROUD OF HIS FANS! WE ARE ALL POLITE AND VERY BIG EDUCATED!

(Found this on a YouTube comment thread for 4minute's great "Hot Issue." Hadn't realized how popular the track is; was released three years ago and is still getting comments every couple of hours.)

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.



( Pun, another diagram, genius )

On one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977

I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.

So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.

If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.

Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.

Most translation sites just copy others, often without attribution. So there's one basic translation of T-ara's "Lovey-Dovey" going around, possibly originating at pop!gasa. Here's the first verse and the chorus. Translators, I'm not impressed, especially not by "those passing by couples." (The ~ sign after "Woo" means a whole lotta woo, I guess (I hear "oo oo-oo oo-oo, oo oo-oo oo-oo").)

( It's so cliché )

( It's clear )

These translations leaving me unfulfilled, I decided to take matters into my own hand. Well, not my hand, or even my mind, as I don't speak Korean. But the magical hand of Google Translate. Grabbing Hangul lyrics from Chacha 짱, we see this:

( 너무 뻔해 )

Today alone, I do not like the math I
Oh, this day is finally bored
(Ooo ooo woowoowoo woowoowoo)'ll pass

Look, look at a passing couple there
I can love you like that
(Ooo ooo woowoowoo woowoowoo) Ooh I feel so lonely

I Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Do not let alone anymore
Now, Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Oh where are you in
Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh Lovey Dovey Dovey Uh Uh Uh Uh
Sure you will find her
I melt the frozen too long, you know where the hell

This is great! Alone, I don't like the math either. "I melt the frozen, you know where the hell." Indeed I do.

( Hair defeats fire )

Woo Hye Mi, on The Voice, well-trained blues, soul, and jazz singer (etc.), sartorially restless, not just putting on different styles on different days (which it seems almost all Korean singers do), but seemingly inhabiting genuinely different cultural categories with each, from post-punk shape-shifter to tough pop waif to after-dinner elegance to god knows what. Paradoxically, in her singing, it's when she goes for playfulness and experiment (like the yelp here in "Maria" at 1:13, and the final 30 seconds) that her music gets in trouble; whereas when she settles into conventional power and passion she knocks us dead. I hope that as I hear her more this turns out not to be a tradeoff she'll have to make, that the adventure and passion will feed each other to the benefit of each.

( Yu Seong Eun )

( Lee Ha Yi on Kpopstar )

( Meanwhile, back in the States )

Over on Tumblr, Trevor posted nice things about me, which I therefore urge you to read. Appropriately enough, the passage of mine he cites as "perfect" is one that I myself find very problematic. Maybe "perfect" can mean, "desperately needs a lot of elaboration" — which is certainly more stimulating than "wraps it up so that we don't have to say anything more on the matter."

In that paragraph, I claim that the rock 'n' soul singers on the U.S. version of The Voice are looking backwards rather than into adventure, whereas the quirk girls who've heard Adele and who draw on the last two decades of quasi-eccentric singer-songwriters are hearing a world of permutation and possibility. And I perceive similarly open ears in the South Korean take on almost any music.

Now, I wouldn't say such things if I didn't believe them, but if confronted by a skeptic I'd have a lot of trouble even explaining what I mean much less supporting it. For instance, why does the re-working of disco and freestyle by Korean producers like Shinsadong Tiger and SweeTune go into my category adventure, whereas the 57 or so varieties of mewlers, bawlers, gruff baritones, AC smoothies, etc. that I'm calling "soul" all get consigned to the retro bin? Why can't the fact of so many varieties be evidence of permutation and possibility in soul, too? South Korea feels fresh to me while the American soul bores feel barely reheated, but this feeling hardly explains anything, and I lean heavily on the explanatory power of the actually quite opaque word "adventure."



( Further responses owed to Askbask and Arbitrary_greay )

Inspired by Christophe calling Big Bang's "Blue" the greatest boyband song since Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way," I compiled a list of fifteen boyband tracks. Not a best-of, not a survey, but some stuff I think highly of, and enough gaps to call forth lists of your own:

The Jewels "Hearts Of Stone"
Dion And The Belmonts "I Wonder Why"
The Marcels "Blue Moon"
The Miracles "You Really Got A Hold On Me"
The Beatles "She Loves You"
The Temptations "(I Know) I'm Losing You"
The Monkees "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone"
The Jackson 5 "I Want You Back"
The Moments "Love On A Two-Way Street"
New Kids On The Block "You Got It (The Right Stuff)"
Bell Biv DeVoe "Poison"
*NSync "I Want You Back"
Backstreet Boys "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"
Big Bang "Tonight"
MBLAQ "I Don't Know"



I was extrapolating forward and back from early '90s usage; so, the male r&b vocal group taken to by kids and teens, with dancing. Orioles and Drifters not eligible, Frankie Lymon And The Teenagers are. "I Want To Hold Your Hand" eligible, "I Am The Walrus" not. "ABC" eligible, "Shake Your Body" not (among other things, vocals too much a Michael-only showcase). I count the Coasters, but I'd have chosen the Robins/Coasters' "Riot In Cell Block Number 9," which is a bit early and the content is probably insufficiently pre-teen (though I myself would've loved it as a tyke). I count the early Wailers, but my choice, "Jailhouse," is too late, and it reaches older than teen. I disqualified duos even though in my heart I'm sure the Everly Brothers belong for "Cathy's Clown" and "All I Have To Do Is Dream," and maybe even Simon & Garfunkel for the electric version of "Sounds Of Silence."

( Ignorance, missing sweet )

So have at it.

( Temptation )

(Crossposting at poptimists, to see if it's still a ghost town.)

Kim Wan Sun, from 1987. It's not quite freestyle, but it's pretty close (closer than Madonna ever got, for instance). And it's pretty great. The same piercing passion.



"리듬속의 그 춤을" is translated most often as "The Dance In The Rhythm." Google Translate gives us "In Rhythm With The Dance," which I like more, whether or not it's accurate.

If YouTube commenters are right, the track was written and produced by Shin Joong Hyun, who also provides the guitar solo; this is interesting in itself, since from last year's compilation I gather he was more a psychedelic and metal guy than a dance guy. Think of Jimmy Page producing the Cover Girls.

Don't know where this music would have found itself in the sounds of South Korea circa 1987, since I barely know what those sounds were. If Wikipedia is right, K-pop didn't coalesce as a genre until the early '90s. But if "Roly-Poly" is right, South Korea was glomming off American disco and club sounds since the '70s. Could Shinsadong Tiger and SweeTune been listening to this song as tykes? (Tiger'd have been four when it came out.)

h/t G'old Korea Vinyl, who stream this and many other vintage tracks, and where I will be spending many hours.

Over on Tumblr I called for an Antonina Armato & Tim James top ten, since that pair have been consistently among the best writers and producers in teenpop for years, probably the only really reliable ones in the Disney stable. They certainly deserve critical recognition and analysis.

This is in response to Maura's referencing them in regard to Disney's recent Shake It Up: Live 2 Dance compilation LP and her pointing out that back in the day Armato had co-written Brenda K. Starr's "I Still Believe" and the Glenn Madeiros/Bobby Brown "She Ain't Worth It."

Haven't relistened to the Armato-James catalog, but these five would likely make it into an ARMATO & JAMES TOP TEN, at least into mine:

Miley Cyrus "See You Again"
Selena Gomez & The Scene "Naturally"
Hoku "How Do I Feel (The Burrito Song)"
Aly & AJ "Not This Year"
Aly & AJ "Potential Breakup Song"



If you have choices of your own, or want to endorse these, you can do so on Tumblr, where they could actually get noticed, or here on my lj, if you'd like.

(To avoid confusion, in case someone actually participates in this: Armato & James didn't write Bella Thorne's "TTYLXOX," the track from Shake It Up: Live 2 Dance that Maura embedded.)

Q: What do the following have in common: Good Day, Dum Dum Boys, Get Away With Murder, In My Eyes, Try To Follow Me?

A: Damned if I know — other than that they're all song titles, modern (i.e., post-nineteenth-century) popular music.

The question arises because those titles are together on a piece of scrap paper from last week, in my handwriting. What was on my mind? I have no memory of writing this.

I have mp3's of some but not all of these, so I wasn't trying to remind myself that I'd been dicking around with their tags, or needed to.

Performers, if you're interested: IU (아이유), Iggy Pop, Ashlee Simpson, Minor Threat, 2NE1 (투에니원). Robyn does an "In My Eyes" too, but I'm sure I've given it no thought in the last year and a half. The Ashlee song is really entitled "Murder."





Your search - "good day" "dum dum boys" "get away with murder" "in my eyes" "try to follow me" - did not match any documents.

Did any of you write about those songs last week?

Also on that piece of scrap paper: my guesses as to who is who in various group photos of SNSD. I've decided it's about time I learned to match name and face for them. So far I'm doing real poorly. They keep changing their damn hairstyles. First photo, I only got Sooyoung, Yuri, Sunny, and Seohyun correct. Next photo I got Tiffany, Yoona, Sunny, Hyoyeon. How did I miss Sooyoung? Third photo, I got Taeyeon, Yoona, Sunny, and Sooyoung. Sunny's the only one I always get instantly.

A peculiar thing happened over the last eight months, while 2NE1 was being my official favorite band in the world, which is that T-ara became the group I actually listen to most. That's one effect of T-ara being worked like dogs: they're always doing something — songs being performed to death, new versions of songs that are three weeks old, videos, sequels to videos, and on and on. While 2NE1 are calibrating their impact, T-ara are flooding the market.

( Pole bearers flee cuteness )

TOP SINGLES First Quarter 2012:

1. T-ara "Lovey-Dovey"
2. Trouble Maker "Trouble Maker"
3. ChoColat "I Like It"
4. Cassie "King Of Hearts"
5. Dev "In My Trunk." Note that at 1:07 there's an actual dope in her trunk:



6. Miss A "Touch"
7. After School "Rambling Girls"
8. Sunny Hill "The Grasshopper Song"
9. Davichi & T-ara "We Were In Love"
10. Clazzi ft. Koti & Jubi & MYK "Sexy Doll"



( 11 through 24 )

( Adventure babies ride bathwater to oblivion )

So far The Voice in 2012 has produced no moments of genius to match Dia Frampton's "Heartless," though "Cinderella" is audacious enough to make me think there's a chance we'll get one. And I've found six standouts that are better than good (and I'm doing this all by YouTube, so my listening hasn't been all-inclusive). Here they are in no particular order:



Wobbly quirks with pebbles and glass thrown in. Lindsey's not yet got the command that a Taylor Swift or a Xenia has to turn her uncertainties into aesthetic bull's eyes, but the wavers and swallowed words fit this performance fine.



Impressed by how both of them have smoldering depths and high fires.

( I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola )

( Revenge of the Idol reject )

( Quirk Rising )

( The Quirk Strikes Back )

( Now I wanna be your daub )

When last I embedded Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra" I asked for theories regarding the dog in the video, but got no response. I would like to ask again, not just regarding this video, but dogs in general in Korean music vids.



My own commentary in full, regarding the dog in "Abracadabra," was: "The dog? Someone walks a dog down the hallway." What I might have added, had a conversation developed, is, "Cool people who have adventurous sex (or whatever) walk haughty dogs down hallways." But I'd overlooked a crucial piece of the video, the dog playing an actual role in the plot. Right after Jea* and dog traverse hallway for the second time, ( SPOILER )

( Dottie West Image Shift Award for 2009 )

*I suspect it's not really Jea but rather a professional dog walker, since we only view the walker from the neck down.

The 내 사랑 싸가지 / 내사랑 싸가지 Saga continues, as Google Translate once again modifies its rendering of Fat Cat's "내 사랑 싸가지" (also sometimes spelled without the space between 내 사랑):

"내 사랑 싸가지" = "My Love Is A Bad Boy"
"내사랑 싸가지" = "Baby Bitch"

I refer you to previous installments in this series:

"My Love, The Douche"
"Guitar Squawks And Robobeats"
"Fat Cat's My Love Bitch"

I'm not claiming these tracks are heavily Afro-Cuban. But they do use one of the clave rhythms:

1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a 4 e & a
X . . X . . X . . . X . X . . .



(You might want to ignore the visuals on that one; it was the best sounding rip on YouTube.)



( The Byrds' Tribal Gathering )