Saturday 24 March 2012 photo 5/13
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[ARTICLE] 2NE1's "I am the Best" Ranked #1 on Stereogum's 'The 20 Best K-Pop Videos' List
Ever since an October 2011 New York Times account of an absolutley ridiculous-sounding sold-out K-pop showcase at Madison Square Garden, I’ve been spending altogether too much time chasing the feeling that I got watching my first K-pop video. SHINee’s “RingDingDong." I’ve been able to get that feeling pretty often. South Korea, see, has figured out pop music pretty much perfectly over the last couple of years. Throughout Asia, and in pockets of the West as well, the music coming out of a few different management companies in Seoul has become absurdly popular, and it’s done it by taking the musical and visual vocabularies of late-’90s American teenpop and amping them up into Blade Runner pleasure-bombs, looking and sounding like an optimist’s idea of the future. The clothes and hairstyles and camera-angles and cheesed-out CGI effects are all cranked up way past 10, and so are the songs’ hooks. If you have any love in your heart for willfully weightless, blissed-out, shame-free pop music, there is a whole lot to love in the 20 videos below.
K-pop is a genre in its relative infancy, really only coming into its own in the last three years and pushing itself to giddier heights every couple of months or so. Though many of the stars do help write their own music, the K-pop assembly line is a very serious thing, one that puts even Nashville’s pop-country industry to shame. These management companies find talented kids, spend years training them, and then debut them in boy- and girl-bands that have all been assembled in the least organic way possible. There’s very little pretense at artistic expression here; instead, these groups are hook-delivery systems polished to a blinding sheen. But that all-surface craftsmanship, in its way, can be just as moving as anything else; it’s humbling to watch people so insanely good at what they do.
I should point out, at the outset, that I am no kind of K-pop historian, and almost everything I learned about the genre comes from clicking the YouTube links that appear after a video ends. That means I’m probably missing a ton of stuff, and actual K-pop aficionados will probably get annoyed with me for ranking some things higher than others and for leaving out classics. I’m a total neophyte, and if I’m leaving out anything important, then by all means set me straight in the comments section. Anyway, this list is less about ranking and more about the sheer abundance of awesomeness that K-pop is giving us right now.
Check out the list below:
20. SHINee – “Lucifer"
19. Girls’ Generation – “Oh!"
18. Kim Wan-Sun – “Be Quiet"
17. TVXQ – “Keep Your Head Down"
16. f(x) – “Nu ABO"
15. B.A.P. – “Warrior"
14. Trouble Maker – “Trouble Maker"
13. BigBang – “Love Song
12. T-Ara – “Roly Poly"
11. miss A – “Bad Girl, Good Girl"
10. SHINee – “RingDingDong"
9. Girls’ Generation – “The Boys"
8. Hyuna – “Bubble Pop!"
7. GD & T.O.P. – “Knock Out"
6. 2NE1 – “Ugly"
Rest assured: You will see 2NE1 on this list again. They are awesome, and they’d probably take up a third of this list if I wasn’t limiting things to two songs per artist. But this one gets special consideration because it’s their emo-ballad moment, their obvious take on TLC’s “Unpretty," and they still dress like refugees from a Hot Topic explosion. Also, if any American emo song in the past five years or so has brought this kind of dizzily positive energy, I haven’t heard it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGe0hHvAGkc&feature=player_embedded
5. Super Junior – “Mr. Simple"
4. GD & T.O.P. – “High High"
3. Brown Eyed Girls – “Abracadabra"
2. BigBang – “Fantastic Baby"
1. 2NE1 – “I Am The Best"
Images that fill me with an immediate and visceral sense of joy: WWE title belts, spiked gauntlets, futuristic sports cars with gullwing doors, bustiers with nails sticking out of them, CGI trains, CGI pyramids, leather jackets with Misfits backpatches, Westminster-ready poodles, jewelry that spins, cartoonish machine guns, chainmail, designer straightjackets, spinning chairs that quote Scarface, haircuts that look like Viking helmets. The song is ridiculously catchy and propulsive, and everything about the video — the editing, the choreography, the sheer volume of what-the-faq imagery — works to support it. In the past few months, I’ve watched this video at least 100 times, and I’ve convinced myself that it’s the greatest music video ever made. I refuse to budge on this. I mean, “Thriller" was great and all, but did it have a crew of ’80s-movie punks smashing walls of platinum plaques with baseball bats for no reason? No. No, it did not.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7_lSP8Vc3o&feature=player_embedded
Stereogum (Stereogum.com) was one of the first MP3 blogs. In 2010 Stereogum was named an Official Honoree of the Webby Awards in the music category and won the Omma Award for Web Site Excellence in the Entertainment/Music category. Its audience includes passionate music fans, industry folks, and household names like Kanye West, Ben Gibbard, and Ryan Adams.
Cited for its commentary and band discovery everywhere from The New Yorker to FOX News, Stereogum’s awards and distinguished mentions include the Plug Award for best music blog, Blender‘s Most Influential People in Online Music, Village Voice‘s Music Blog Of The Year, and Entertainment Weekly‘s Best Music Website.
Looks like a number of influential western music outlets are starting to catch the K-pop virus...with 2NE1 finding their way on most westerners radar.
Source: stereogum
Thanks to BaddestFemaleCL for the tip
Reuploaded by tazanya@ygladies.com
Thanks to BaddestFemaleCL for the tip
Reuploaded by tazanya@ygladies.com
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