2025 Mix 7: Attempting to crack the "Say So" code, punching oneself in the face with one's own little fist, a David Sylvian jump scare, and bliss-house for people on or off of drugs
Dalt's 2002 album, "¡Ay!" is worth a listen. A tad slight, but I enjoy its quietude. And look at David Sylvian sounding like he's auditioning for "The Sopranos" theme song! Love. it!
Thank you! "Maps" specifically came from the (not very good but full of interesting revelations from interviews) John Seabrook book "The Song Machine." I always wondered if he got that right, since the earlier version of this anecdote just mentions indie music generally without remembering what the song was (I think it sounds more like the Strokes -- in fact, it reminds me the most of the "Stroke of Genie-us" mash-up from the early 00s, which even has the exact chorus problem he's referring to, whereas "Maps" is much more self-contained and structured without an obvious place for a chorus to even go) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPPbT3svAw
"Gottwald remembers well the genesis of “Since U Been Gone.” “That was a conscious move by Max and myself, because we were listening to alternative and indie music and talking about some song-I don’t remember what it was. I said, ‘Ah, I love this song,’ and Max was like, ‘If they would just write a damn pop chorus on it!’ It was driving him nuts, because that indie song was sort of on six, going to seven, going to eight, the chorus comes . . . and it goes back down to five. It drove him crazy. And when he said that, it was like, light bulb. ‘Why don’t we do that, but put a big chorus on it?’ It worked."
Don't know how relevant this is, but SM Entertainment in particular, Girls' Generation's agency, uses a lot of Scandinavian, British, and American songwriters, has done so for a long time. Other agencies do too, but SM seems the most aggressive in importing European and Anglo-American talent.
I think what I'd call "lounge" and "easy listening" has been in K-pop as singer showcases and album tracks for as long as I've been listening (I started 2009) but in 2015 or so it became more central to the pop singles, which coincides with my getting less interested in K-pop, actually. I do quite like Oh My Girl circa 2015, though, "Closer" and "Windy Day" especially; but listening now, I don't seem to be hearing *jazz* chords in "Windy Day"'s summer breeziness. I also associate "Windy Day" with another K-pop trend I'm ambivalent about, the adding of more and more parts beyond verse-prechorus-chorus-break while deliberately (?) not worrying about whether the mood stays coherent. "Windy Day" was the one where I said to myself, in the middle, "Wait!" then, "How did they get here?"
I had several very long digressions I decided to cut -- one is that I think both Japanese and Korean pop have always integrated "easy" and "soft" in a more casual way than a lot of western pop has -- this was a huge revelation in my 1974 Japanese pop survey. If I'd had more time or inclination I'd try to find some examples of what I'm talking about, because it is something I associate with K-pop that I hear sporadically after the period I stopped paying much attention (c. 2014). During that 2011-2014 period I don't think I would have identified this smoothness and softness as foundational to K-pop, even though you could definitely hear it (but it was part of the anything-goes nature of that period, the idea that you could rip things off shamelessly from all over and come up with something exciting and fresh).
And the thing that got me thinking about it was the T-pop selection, which is sort of its own thing, but put me in mind of a lot of midtempo K-pop stuff that I tend to skip, which is why it doesn't come to mind easily.
I do think the "easy/soft" vs. "not that" lines are weird right now in American pop -- that you wouldn't say that the synth soup that you get with Taylor and Jack Antonoff represents some compromised easy listening against the real music by Charli XCX (or whatever you want to use as a proxy). But there is still a bit of a difference, and even though some artists just do everything (Billie Eilish has an interesting approach to this, I think), I do think there are still fault lines in a way that there don't seem to be as obviously in K-pop.
Paradoxically (in regard to what you're saying about the relative irrelevance of early '80s boogie funk), one *analogy* I feel when I hear NewJeans (frinstance) and "Espresso" is to disco's use of easy listening: when someone tapes a disco beat under "easy listening," the sound can feel "luscious" rather than "safe and soothing." Am thinking of the Boris Midney/USA-European Connection second album (1979). Not that his music sounds like NewJeans or uses jazz chords; it's like a rhythmification of '50s-'60s "beautiful music": strings, telephone-hold guitar noodling, and high-pitch delicate female chirping but with propulsion/percussion underneath.
Yeah, I think that's a good description! And it's kind of funny that the "easy listening" they go for (in "Say So" and "Espresso") are some of the elements of easy listening already embedded in disco. Though with "Espresso" and "Say So" specifically I think the lusciousness in the arrangement of soft sounds is missing because it's put together...I don't know, inelegantly? And what you get is more like a congealed blob of signifiers of lusciousness.
NewJeans seems a different -- there's an airiness to everything they've done. Like I said with the comparison to Dua Lipa, I think there are a lot of different people mining some of the same sounds, but for whatever reason K-pop was much more nimble with it (and in fact moved *away* from the sounds of the "influence" I'm pointing at in "Say So").
I also don't think it's a coincidence that K-pop leaned in to the hipper frontiers of R&B -- e.g. NewJeans working with Erika de Casier, though even before then "Attention" was one of the more effortlessly funky K-pop songs I'd heard in a long while when it came out, sounded almost astoundingly hip -- as American pop was leaning out. During peak the fake-disco era in A-pop, K-pop was drawing more inspiration from "My Boo"/Atlanta bass, Pink Pantheress, lots of much more agile music. (A lot of these terms probably aren't right, just spitballing.)
Not relevant to this discussion but I found this hilarious sentence in an Amazon "editorial review" for Black Russian Expanded Edition and decided I had to post it *somewhere*. Don't know who wrote it, of course. "The chief architect of the euro-disco sound of the late 1970’s, Russian born producer Boris Midney built a state of the art recording studio in New York City, became one of the first producers to fully utilize 48 track recording, and proceeded to make symphonic disco music that completely revolutionized the dance music scene and paved the way for emerging styles of trance, hip-hop, drum & bass and house music."
Yeah, that's a cool sound -- I think that Blonde Redhead end up doing something that tritone move a lot (that's what it reminds me of, anyway) but I think you beat them to it!
Dalt's 2002 album, "¡Ay!" is worth a listen. A tad slight, but I enjoy its quietude. And look at David Sylvian sounding like he's auditioning for "The Sopranos" theme song! Love. it!
And before "¡Ay!" she made several collections of ambient electronica instrumentals, interesting career path into pop
The “Since U Been Gone” and “Maps” correlation is simply throttling me. Fantastic essay as always.
Thank you! "Maps" specifically came from the (not very good but full of interesting revelations from interviews) John Seabrook book "The Song Machine." I always wondered if he got that right, since the earlier version of this anecdote just mentions indie music generally without remembering what the song was (I think it sounds more like the Strokes -- in fact, it reminds me the most of the "Stroke of Genie-us" mash-up from the early 00s, which even has the exact chorus problem he's referring to, whereas "Maps" is much more self-contained and structured without an obvious place for a chorus to even go) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPPbT3svAw
"Gottwald remembers well the genesis of “Since U Been Gone.” “That was a conscious move by Max and myself, because we were listening to alternative and indie music and talking about some song-I don’t remember what it was. I said, ‘Ah, I love this song,’ and Max was like, ‘If they would just write a damn pop chorus on it!’ It was driving him nuts, because that indie song was sort of on six, going to seven, going to eight, the chorus comes . . . and it goes back down to five. It drove him crazy. And when he said that, it was like, light bulb. ‘Why don’t we do that, but put a big chorus on it?’ It worked."
If it isn't quantum sound, what is "Yini Ngathi"?
Just amapiano I think!
That's what it sounded like to my more untrained ears.
Don't know how relevant this is, but SM Entertainment in particular, Girls' Generation's agency, uses a lot of Scandinavian, British, and American songwriters, has done so for a long time. Other agencies do too, but SM seems the most aggressive in importing European and Anglo-American talent.
I think what I'd call "lounge" and "easy listening" has been in K-pop as singer showcases and album tracks for as long as I've been listening (I started 2009) but in 2015 or so it became more central to the pop singles, which coincides with my getting less interested in K-pop, actually. I do quite like Oh My Girl circa 2015, though, "Closer" and "Windy Day" especially; but listening now, I don't seem to be hearing *jazz* chords in "Windy Day"'s summer breeziness. I also associate "Windy Day" with another K-pop trend I'm ambivalent about, the adding of more and more parts beyond verse-prechorus-chorus-break while deliberately (?) not worrying about whether the mood stays coherent. "Windy Day" was the one where I said to myself, in the middle, "Wait!" then, "How did they get here?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJqhKWo89FQ
I had several very long digressions I decided to cut -- one is that I think both Japanese and Korean pop have always integrated "easy" and "soft" in a more casual way than a lot of western pop has -- this was a huge revelation in my 1974 Japanese pop survey. If I'd had more time or inclination I'd try to find some examples of what I'm talking about, because it is something I associate with K-pop that I hear sporadically after the period I stopped paying much attention (c. 2014). During that 2011-2014 period I don't think I would have identified this smoothness and softness as foundational to K-pop, even though you could definitely hear it (but it was part of the anything-goes nature of that period, the idea that you could rip things off shamelessly from all over and come up with something exciting and fresh).
And the thing that got me thinking about it was the T-pop selection, which is sort of its own thing, but put me in mind of a lot of midtempo K-pop stuff that I tend to skip, which is why it doesn't come to mind easily.
I do think the "easy/soft" vs. "not that" lines are weird right now in American pop -- that you wouldn't say that the synth soup that you get with Taylor and Jack Antonoff represents some compromised easy listening against the real music by Charli XCX (or whatever you want to use as a proxy). But there is still a bit of a difference, and even though some artists just do everything (Billie Eilish has an interesting approach to this, I think), I do think there are still fault lines in a way that there don't seem to be as obviously in K-pop.
Paradoxically (in regard to what you're saying about the relative irrelevance of early '80s boogie funk), one *analogy* I feel when I hear NewJeans (frinstance) and "Espresso" is to disco's use of easy listening: when someone tapes a disco beat under "easy listening," the sound can feel "luscious" rather than "safe and soothing." Am thinking of the Boris Midney/USA-European Connection second album (1979). Not that his music sounds like NewJeans or uses jazz chords; it's like a rhythmification of '50s-'60s "beautiful music": strings, telephone-hold guitar noodling, and high-pitch delicate female chirping but with propulsion/percussion underneath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRkk38SrT6E
Yeah, I think that's a good description! And it's kind of funny that the "easy listening" they go for (in "Say So" and "Espresso") are some of the elements of easy listening already embedded in disco. Though with "Espresso" and "Say So" specifically I think the lusciousness in the arrangement of soft sounds is missing because it's put together...I don't know, inelegantly? And what you get is more like a congealed blob of signifiers of lusciousness.
NewJeans seems a different -- there's an airiness to everything they've done. Like I said with the comparison to Dua Lipa, I think there are a lot of different people mining some of the same sounds, but for whatever reason K-pop was much more nimble with it (and in fact moved *away* from the sounds of the "influence" I'm pointing at in "Say So").
I also don't think it's a coincidence that K-pop leaned in to the hipper frontiers of R&B -- e.g. NewJeans working with Erika de Casier, though even before then "Attention" was one of the more effortlessly funky K-pop songs I'd heard in a long while when it came out, sounded almost astoundingly hip -- as American pop was leaning out. During peak the fake-disco era in A-pop, K-pop was drawing more inspiration from "My Boo"/Atlanta bass, Pink Pantheress, lots of much more agile music. (A lot of these terms probably aren't right, just spitballing.)
The difference seems to me to be that Sabrina Carpenter is telling you how to have fun while NewJeans are showing you how to have fun.
Not relevant to this discussion but I found this hilarious sentence in an Amazon "editorial review" for Black Russian Expanded Edition and decided I had to post it *somewhere*. Don't know who wrote it, of course. "The chief architect of the euro-disco sound of the late 1970’s, Russian born producer Boris Midney built a state of the art recording studio in New York City, became one of the first producers to fully utilize 48 track recording, and proceeded to make symphonic disco music that completely revolutionized the dance music scene and paved the way for emerging styles of trance, hip-hop, drum & bass and house music."
Love the songwriting lesson, it inspires me to play with those chords and see if new ones can be slipped in somewhere.
Here's my best attempt at a 4-chord R&B-tinged repetition, early 90's style; the chords are
Gmaj7/Em6 (inverted with C# in bass, so the first interval's a tritone, I twigged much later)/Fm7/Bm7
https://youtu.be/87VnFurVD50?si=1iMNjYW4svqouc7j
Yeah, that's a cool sound -- I think that Blonde Redhead end up doing something that tritone move a lot (that's what it reminds me of, anyway) but I think you beat them to it!