Jukeboxers agree: It’s Better Than Tiesto!
[Video][Website]
[6.67]
Madeleine Lee: I find this song hard to love, and it’s not because it’s bad, but because it’s intimidating. Where other songs with this kind of pile-on organizational structure end up limp or directionless, “Red Light” wields its beat changes with purpose, and if you can’t keep up, too bad. I may find it hostile, but I’ll still dance to it, in a circle facing my friends and with my elbows out.
[6]
Anthony Easton: For a song called “Red Light,” does anything move faster, refuse any guidelines including narrative, and just speed into a kind of fucked up oblivion? Gorgeous and smooth with textures that work like Adderall after an all nighter.
[8]
Iain Mew: Nothing ever stops moving, there’s a clock ticking extra fast to emphasise the hurry, and the effect is like turning the disorientating transitions of “I Got a Boy” or “Wolf” into an entire song. The ease that f(x) bring to the vocals holds it together — they always sound in control of where they’re going, and that makes whizzing through the harsh landscape thrilling rather than uncomfortable.
[8]
Patrick St. Michel: “Try to breathe for a moment,” f(x) sing, but good luck with that. “Red Light” is controlled chaos at its finest, a whirring song that packs in so many details and zips off in so many directions at once that it should break down at some point. Clocks tick, bass rumbles like its processing itself through a talkbox, and voices spill into and over one another. And that’s all just before the faux-chorus breakdown swivels into a finale full of disembodied voices stuttering off in the back. It’s disorganization made orderly — it took five people total to write and two to produce — and great evidence that overproduction works wonders when everything clicks into place just right, even if the end result is sort of suffocating.
[8]
Hazel Robinson: Aw, man. This was all menacing bass and Little Mix strut, and then it hits the boshed up bit and drops the menace completely, like it turning out the gun pointed at your head is a super soaker.
[4]
Alfred Soto: Its kinetics impressive, it nevertheless boats spongy keyboards and an air horn transition — in 2014 the most obnoxious musical element. Yellow means proceed with caution, you know.
[5]
Megan Harrington: In translation, f(x)’s red light is the universal sign for stop, but from the spooky ringing rotary phone that opens the music video to the crank thrush of the beat, “Red Light” sounds devilish. I can’t help but imagine eyeballs glowing red in the dark and rooms stained red with blood. Something sinister lurks beneath the creaking dance floor boards.
[7]
Brad Shoup: Harsher than “STUPiG,” my 2014 gold standard for pop needle detonation. Once you get past the refrain’s PCD first half, there’s some shrill — and astounding — harmonies. They don’t have long to register, because once the track establishes its excellent boom-bap/croaking Benassi-style synthbass combo, it’s off to the death races.
[5]
Jessica Doyle: Multiple people (including myself) have in the past fallen into the trap of looking to f(x) as a more “authentic”/creative/independent/pick-your-vaguely-positive-adjective alternative to the K-pop girl-group formula, now running on overdrive: all the SISTARs and Stellars and Girls’ Days and Tahitis and AOAs and Dal*Shabets competing to be the next SNSD, or at the very least the next Miss A. Such thinking is comforting — interesting maximalist beats! arty packaging! Amber! — and, like a lot of comforting thinking, bullshit. The K-indie scene exists, and f(x) is not part of it. The lack of overtly sexual choreography is almost certainly SM Entertainment’s decision rather than the group’s; the skittering cockroach beat comes courtesy of a UK-based publishing house who has also written for DBSK and Super Junior (as well as Little Mix and Miley Cyrus); and when not opening “Red Light” Krystal has been filming a gentle reality show with her sister Jessica… of SNSD. I love “Red Light” for its impressive packaging of ambiguity — the pleas to slow down and breathe that come right before the chorus kicks in; the chill in the production versus the affectionate warning of the lyrics; the gloomy atmosphere versus Krystal’s shrug at 3:20 — but don’t mistake it for anything revolutionary, in terms of personal expression. The machine is capable of a lot. The women currently working with the machine are capable of a lot.
[9]