Wild video. The combination of the paint effect with the classical sample in the opening really works, even if it’s a bit obvious.
HIGHLIGHT also came back. Feels like it’s been awhile. Their last release of any kind was almost a year ago. Their last studio album was 2016. They are still kind of a big deal. Even though I like this song more than most of theirs, it’s still meh.
Last news. There’s a mostly unpopular, but talented and fun group named DONGKIZ. Recently they actually got a moderate amount of positive attention! And then they immediately mixed things up.
Changing up their name and their team. I hope it works out.
The song is ok, but not exciting at all. Do not think this will be a hit. The music video is surprisingly… cheap? They all filmed separately with chroma key that is far from ideal. No group dance even. Very stark contrast to some of the other MVs we are seeing, such as:
NCT Dream (the NCT with the kids in it). The Gamestop set is really fun. The song is pretty good. The best part is how they intentionally “glitch” the choreography. Clever and appropriate! Will be interesting to see how that dance looks on stage.
Forgot one thing. Source Music. They started GFriend and never succeeded at anything else other than being bought out by HYBE. HYBE is the company that spawned from BigHit (BTS). After letting GFriend go, they’ve had nothing going on, but apparently they still exist. They brought in two already famous idols, and they are bringing in some trainees to start a new group called LE SSERAFIM. Here’s their official Twitter account.
This is just one of those auto-generated style of YouTube video that is designed to get picked up by the algorithm and get lots of views. Perhaps inadvertently they’ve summed up all of contemporary KPop in a brief 17 minutes.
Melon is the top digital music service in South Korea. They took the top 10 songs from Melon’s end of year list each year from 2009-2021. After filtering out songs that weren’t from KPop idols they took a short cilp of each song and just stacked them end to end. 10 to 1 each year. That’s it.
It really tells the whole story. You can see groups rising and falling. You can see what groups were dominant with repeated hits, and who was a flash in the pan. You can see what groups were middle of the road successful with just a few entries here and there. You can see around 2015/2016 as one set of completely dominant groups completely vanishes to be replaced by a new wave. You can see when BTS suddenly dominates the world. It’s also a pretty good video for someone new to KPop to possibly discover the hit songs they don’t know already. I already knew literally 100% of these songs, lol.
I think the only thing in this video to someone who doesn’t have a lot of KPop knowledge is that a lot of the soloists that make the list are actually members of other popular groups. I could imagine someone thinking “How did this random solo ballad make the cut?” not realizing that soloist was a member of a group that was completely dominant at the time. Like in 2014 when Taeyang’s “Eyes, Nose, Lips” takes the number one spot. That’s Taeyang from BIGBANG, and also that song is fucking legendary.
Definitely worth 17 minutes of anyone’s life who cares about any kind of music.
Also, I would love to find more videos like this for other genres/countries of music. Even genres I don’t like. Just to be able to absorb a history in such a concise manner is educational and enjoyable.
