K-Pop Nine: A New View on K-Entertainment

Listen, I never promised consistency in posting.  I hope everyone had a good New Year's celebration. I drank a shit ton of wine, ate lobster, and smoked just the tiniest bit of weed while getting rejected by men on online dating sites. Here's hoping that in 2019 I can actually keep up with writing this blog.  20. To Heart - fromis_9 While the way I wrote about Glass Shoes  made it seem like that track was fromis_9's debut, they really didn't debut until January 2018 with To Heart . The track, for the most part, just sounds like a stereotypical APink-knockoff that wouldn't really turn heads. And it really didn't, considering that the song itself didn't have a lot of success. Now I like this song for a few reasons. Firstly, there's a real string section! You can hear real violins! It's fantastic. It's even lampshaded in the video itself with Gyuri playing the song on her violin. It's absolutely fantastic and sets the mood for the e...

So Twice just released their new song “Likey” and it’s great. If you haven’t listened to it, I’ll hook you up fam just watch it here: It’s so great, I’ve compiled a list of all the reasons why “Likey” is one of Twice’s best title tracks.      1.      Sana gets the hook Let’s face it, Sana has the voice for hook parts. She’s high-pitched and cute in a way that makes you want to sing along. She’s that stereotypical hot-cute girl that everyone loved and wanted to be in high school. I still aspire to that, I really do. Sana is never going to be able to hold a song by herself; she simply doesn’t have the talent for it, but god knows that she SLAYS her one line parts, which is why she almost always gets the line that gets repeated over and over again. She simply nails it and when she says “me likey likey” I also likey likey.      2.      Momo gets a dance break       Momo ...

Twice generally delivers a bop of some kind or another. They're all strong hooks with upbeat tempos and even if the songs aren't necessarily fantastic, they're at least redeemable in some ways. Like "Cheer Up" made up for it's strange take on tempo by having one of the best hooks in the past few years, and "TT" made up for being "TT" by having easily the best choreos Twice has had thus far. "Signal" has, well, none of these. "Signal" lacks the punch that I have come to expect from a Twice song. While it follows the general pattern that hook songs tend to follow, this song just falls so exceptionally flat that I can't believe this is a full release. There's basically nothing to go on here.  "Signal" relies a lot on the quasi-rap that a lot of idol groups use, but it's not done well. While Chaeyoung and Dahyun are the best suited to this kind of thing, I found them underused while Mom...