What’s the name of the game?
A quick K-pop mix I made last night. Just 8 songs I’ve been enjoying lately.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
1 Plays
Big Bang
Fantastic Baby
Big Bang, “Fantastic Baby.” If “Tonight” gave us Big Bang as the biggest band in the world, “Fantastic Baby” has the task of finding where to go once you’re at the top. The answer, it seems, is to take advantage of your imperial phase by trying something different, whether it’s loosening the corset of pop song structure a little more (even “High High” had a middle eight - and a real chorus, for that matter) or trying out your new Kanye impression. The result is fucking massive. Big Bang aren’t getting off that throne any time soon.
With any luck, this song is going to be their “I Am The Best”, a global calling card that pulls the trick of sounding both like everything you’ve ever heard and like nothing you’ve heard before. And perhaps this ship is meant to sail in international waters? The title, which seems like T-shirt slogan Engrish at first, is actually perfectly idiomatic within the song: “Wow, fantastic, baby.” What I’m trying to say is, this better get at least 5 votes on 2012’s Pazz & Jop poll, y’all hear?
Big Bang, “Blue”. Big Bang started as a hip-hop/R&B group and then turned into a J-pop group, but soft rock/pop is a more natural direction for them than it would seem: the seeds of “Blue” were arguably planted as far back as “Haru Haru”, through to Japanese single “声をきかせて” (Let Me Hear Your Voice) and last year’s U2-aping “Love Song”, each with less and less prominence given to a dance beat. “Blue”’s innovation is to take out Big Bang’s usual shouting-from-a-mountaintop bombast; the choruses are practically murmurs. As a consequence, it doesn’t really build to anything - the bridge-beat drop-final chorus ending is more for organization’s sake than composition’s - but it’s just so pretty that I’m with it the whole time. And I would listen to Daesung sing a textbook on industrial relations.
(See here re: the use of a white model in the video, and possibly also re: why they shot this in New York.) (But I do quite like the editing that, to paraphrase someone on ilX because my computer will die if I go to check the exact quote right now, makes it look like they both are chasing her and are her.)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
3,756 Plays
Heath Caring
Drive
The Drive soundtrack, chopped and screwed by Heath Caring.
