And we close the week with dark pop 101…
[Video]
[5.38]
Leah Isobel: TO: THEBLACKLABEL
FROM: Jesse Bluu
Subject: JEon Somi Pitch?
Ok here me out you guys. I have the PERFECT song for jeon Somi. Imagine a really icy and intense dance song that theyll play in the Clubs. I think the stans would call it cunty??? BUT get this: it interpolates that Sean Kingston song where he says hes going to kill himself!!! The first line goes call me your beeeeeaaaaautiful girllllll and imma let this body work… and then her voice would get all chopped up into the beat like b-e-e-e-e-e-a-a-a-a-u-t-i-f-u-l g-i-i-i-i-i-r-l. its a SMASH. Lmk what you think
TO: Jesse Bluu
FROM: THEBLACKLABEL
Subject: Re:JEon Somi pitch?
That sounds like trash.
TO: THEBLACKLABEL
FROM: Jesse Bluu
Subject: Re:Re:JEon Somi Pitch?
No you dont understand!!! its trash but thats why its GOOD! People love trash! We live in a trash world! Love is fleeting and pleasure is cheap and the only thing people have left are there memories. do you remember how you felt the first time you heard Sean Kingston sing that song? How you felt when you locked eyes with a sexy girl at the Club? the first time you did cocaine???? those were the DAYS, man. Thats what people want to remember! We gotta give the people what they want!!! Otherwise its all for nothing… everything ive ever done… every note ive ever composed on fruityloops…… every girl I wanted to dance with. it was all for nothing. But i know that it wasnt. Pop Music is for the people. Its a beautiful blunt instrument. You want people to remember the good times, the fun stuff, the good cocaine, the dark sexy sex!! This is the song i was born to make!!! THIS SONG IS A SMASH!
FROM: THEBLACKLABEL
TO: Jesse Bluu
SUBJECT: Re:Re:Re:JEon Somi Pitch?
Fine. We’ll try it. But lay off the cocaine.
[7]
Nortey Dowuona: Then maybe Zikai will stop, saving all the best songs for herself.Jeon sounds cool tho.
[4]
Iain Mew: My first reaction to “Closer” was delight that someone was taking up the baton offered by “Angel of My Dreams” and that it made sense for it to be another singer from a group formed through a TV competition. The more I listen, the more I realise that the song lacks any of the same substance and instead become impressed by the aesthetic illusion that got it to that first impression. Jeon Somi, with or without heavily applied vocal filters, gives a sense of not all being right, backed up by the bit taken straight from the middle eight of “Paparazzi” (the Lady Gaga one, not the Girls’ Generation one), the shoutout to Blackout, the freaky decay of the video, the way “you and I oh” in the interpolation is used to transmit the word “suicidal” while never saying it. It’s all filled with so many skillfully arranged indicators of lurking darkness that it somewhat disguises that the song underneath is too blank to provide anything for them all to attach to.
[6]
Ian Mathers: Ok, maybe interpolations are acceptable if they’re mainly rescuing a decent melody from dire lyrics. Just to be safe, whack a decently sized bosh on top of it and keep it under three minutes.
[7]
Joshua Lu: If you can get past the gratuitous Sean Kingston dead wife montage remix, “Closer” works well, with Somi punctuating the ominous backdrop with both foreboding longing and punchy bits. Unfortunately, I have ears, and I can’t get past the gratuitous Sean Kingston dead wife montage remix.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: Jeon Somi singlehandedly reviving the “Slow Down a Pop Song to Make It Sound Creepy” movie trailer trend of the 2010s.
[4]
Claire Davidson: The idea of K-pop song interpolating Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls”—itself famously built off of an obvious “Stand by Me” sample—sounds like a parody of our current risk-averse, nostalgia-baiting music industry, to say nothing of how liberally Jeon Somi’s “Closer” borrows from it, infusing both its chorus and verses with the same melodies as the original. Bizarrely enough, though, that choice kind of works: when delivered in Jeon’s feathery upper register, her seductive pleas to be called beautiful by her partner take on an almost subversive air, calling back to the lethal magnetism of Kingston’s original love interests and their ability to leave one “suicidal” with their rejection. Here, Jeon is proud to wield that power, and she relishes in the knowledge of her own desirability. Unfortunately, that’s really the only distinctive element “Closer” has to its name; the remainder of the track is all airy pulses of synth bass and spliced vocal fragments. This is not a song to be enjoyed but passively absorbed while doing something else—pay any mote of attention to it, and it vanishes into thin air.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is the most beautifully stupid composition that I’ve had the luck to be alive for — if 2019’s wave of bort-pop was a drearily modernist approach to ransacking the pop canon, this is post-modern in its glory, distending Sean Kingston into steely dancefloor diva substrate. Such strange miracles are worthy of deep appreciation.
[7]