The Jukebox turns its attention to Q-Pop…
[Video]
[5.25]
Will Rivitz: A few years back, when I was first getting into K-pop, someone whose opinion I trust mentioned that they found it hard to listen to much of it because its musical style tended to lag a couple years behind its American counterpart. This was around 2011 or so, when many of the groups I liked were biting Britney’s style circa Blackout, and so despite how true the statement might have been across the board I certainly believed it. I now see in the style an artistic maturity I’m sure existed when I was in high school but could nevertheless not find then: a genre that exists on its own, not beholden to the whims of American radio four years prior. Point is, this song sounds in 2017 like the kind of K-pop I listened to five years ago. Qazaq-pop may be exciting and new, but if this is any indication the genre needs to take a second to find its footing.
[4]
Olivia Rafferty: Taking cues from all the scariest parts of East Asian pop music, here we have something that flits between a dirty hip-winder and a panic attack in the club.
[4]
Iain Mew: Security alarm synths, growled and clucked vocals and a sense that anything could happen at any moment except maybe a tune — it feels like the next step into chaos from something like Exo’s “Wolf.” There’s a reason they didn’t take that route, of course, but this is a lot of fun for a dead end.
[7]
Ryo Miyauchi: When they convene in this siren raid, Ninety One hammers a point like a schoolyard bully making his stroll to make sure his lesser wimps know of their place in the food chain. They talk a good one to keep their crown. But the credibility that they fall back heavily on for their power feels as existent as the straw-men supposedly doubting their authenticity — which is to say, not very.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: I love that writing for TSJ exposes me to things like Q-pop: boy bands from Kazakhstan! However, I really wish this didn’t combine the worst impulses of 5-year-old EDM with the aggro attitude of a Limp Bizkit. (Why so defensive, guys? I know, I know.) This is entirely joyless pop music, and without joy, what is pop?
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: I’m downright giggling at the ol’ “We are not the same, I am a ____” trope now being turned into bragging about being amphibious mutants. Essentially most of this song is a mess, either musically (basically a post-Skrillex mess of dive-bombing synths and gang vocals, with the occasionally really challenging use of syllable stutters and digital delay) or lyrically (essentially a bunch of boys really insistently barking “RESPECT ME DAWG”). It’s a whole lot of aggression and demanding, but it’s at least playful enough on its own terms that you know these guys don’t take themselves too serious.
[4]
Cassy Gress: My first thought on seeing the video was, “oh, it’s a group of G-Dragons, or Big Bang mk II” but that’s unfair. What this is, though, is a rather cacophonous swagfest that works mainly because its noisy aggression is tempered by the wink and the tongue sticking out.
[7]
Jessica Doyle: To address the obvious first: the video is some thorough YG cribbing, right down to Alem’s Taeyang impersonation, asked for by absolutely no one on this green earth. Although possibly the video’s bloodstains-ballgowns-trashing-the-hotel-room banalities are meant to anchor a song that’s anything but banal — although I’m not sure you can appreciate how not-banal it is without some context: not just “boy band,” but “boy band who became obnoxiously huge last year with a style that sounds and looks relatively conventional to those of us used to K-pop but scared people enough to get their concerts shut down in parts of Kazakhstan.” Under the circumstances, I expected them to start their sophomore album with something big-vocaled and safe, the rough edges smoothed away. Instead they decided to make a whole song out of rough edges: serrated growls where a chorus would be; and varying beats like heated snakes catching each other’s tails midway through lines; and none of the three singers sounding like themselves; and ZaQ’s raps turning into air bubbles; and AZ deliberately, almost aggressively, fey in his delivery. Startling, too, is the metaphor: everyone is sinking, but Ninety One doesn’t rise above; Ninety One has gills, Ninety One is going to flourish in the darkness. “Su Asty” is thus less a provocation than a firm planting of the feet, delivered with a smirk. (The smirk delivered by Bala, obviously.) And thus Ninety One — who wrote the song themselves — AZ and ZaQ have the lyric credits, Alem and Bala wrote the music — is established as more confident, more complicated, more exasperating, and more just plain ridiculous than even I had anticipated. “No matter how you study, you will never comprehend us,” they claim. Maybe not, but the researching will be fun.
[8]