I-dle member encourages you to quit, achieves a Perfect All-Kill in the process…
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[8]
Ian Mathers: Every generation gets the multiple iterations of “Take This Job and Shove It” it deserves. (This one is too anodyne to stack up against my beloved “Slack Motherfucker” though.)
[5]
David Allun Jones: While millennials like me waste our 9-to-5 days fretting over whether to “quiet quit” or not, Gen Z representative Soyeon offers a succinct K-pop confection response to basically say “Fuck that noise, I’m out!” It’s hard not to get swept in the “romantic” fantasy, the Disney-fied Weezer musical framing and Soyeon’s winsome yelps evoking a post-toesa cartoon-land paradise where you shove it to your boss and spend your newfound freedom traveling the world into your AARP years and, in the meanwhile, perhaps finally making your novel-writing dreams a reality. The not-twenty-something in me easily sniffs out there’s no mention of lack of monetary funds or parents willing to let you forever camp out in your childhood bedroom at no charge, but I’m at least inspired to finally get around to writing that screenplay that’s been forever frozen in Act I.
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Lichelle: As someone who has quit a terrible job and proceeded to feel like that one Nicole Kidman (hey Adéla!) picture, I feel this deeply.
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Jel Bugle: Soyeon — one of the premier K-pop artists — has a great sense of melody and hooks, though musically this does put me in me mind of the Minder theme. She could do a great cover of “I Could Be So Good For You.”
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Nortey Dowuona: Not fun: the english captions said “one day, we’ll all grow old” and the Genius English translation said “in the end, we’re all going to become grandmothers,” which makes me once again glance at Pop Time and ask: are you interested in only doing jaunty pan alley tunes for dark moments in Dreamworks movies? Cuz that isn’t really happening right now. And you did miss the last Dreamworks movie too, so hurry up. (Where was Kian in all this, by the way?)
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Tom Feckerdt: When sitting down to write this blurb on a Sunday afternoon, I realized I casually had a work tab open in my browser. There was nothing urgent going on; I’d opened it out of sheer habit. And then I began thinking about just how many times this past year I’d said some variation of “I’m gonna toesa,” and how the possibility of me ever actually toesa-ing only gets smaller the more compromises I allow myself to make, the more tasks I accept with no one to fall back on, the more I get used to receiving work emails at 9:30PM on a Saturday. But before letting myself spiral over that mild epiphany, I shifted my focus to the actual song, and I felt so relieved that, despite its title and opening lines, it actually has little interest in detailing the tedium of work. In fact, by the time we’re done with the first verse, the narrator has already quit her job and stopped thinking about it altogether. Everything afterwards plays out like an exaggerated fantasy, a romantic daydream that only stops for a couple of lines in the bridge to ask you not to kill its buzz — a progression that strikes me as the correct artistic choice. That first verse was acidic enough; going further down that road would’ve only dampened the song’s effortless happy-go-lucky charm. I don’t really find it “funny” that Soyeon is singing poorly on purpose, but luckily the instrumental is just as teeny tiny and constricted as her, and the whole thing sounds like being at some random karaoke bar, hearing a woman on her third drink project a bad day at work into a song. And realistically, if that’s as close as some of us are ever going to get to toesa-ing, I welcome this tune wholeheartedly.
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Harlan Talib Ockey: Soyeon’s vocal timbre here is fascinating. Breathy and forward in the throat, glittering with hope and nostalgia while still easily wilting into a complaint or sigh. There are a lot of ways to project effortless relatability in a song, but this is really skillful.
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Ashton Arbus: I love the way she says “la” in this. “Lahh”, like there are two Hs at the end of it. I’ve been saying it over and over to myself. “Lahh, lahh lahh”. Incredible.
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Edward Okulicz: This would be irresistible as an out-of-nowhere musical interlude in a TV comedy. I might even rewind and rewatch it for an extra dose of job-quitting escapism, but my morning alarm stays active.
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Callie Petch: When I was a kid, I was massively into Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, the Cartoon Network series in which a fictionalised version of real-life J-Pop Rock duo PUFFY (voiced in-show by Janice Kawaye & Grey DeLisle) get up to all sorts of mid-00s CN golden age shenanigans. But, more than the actual cartoons, I was captured by the band’s music, snippets of which would soundtrack chases and scene transitions and sometimes even sectioned-off music videos. Primary songwriters Tamio Okuda & Andy Sturmer’s turn-of-the-millennium Japanese take on classic rock, buffed to the mirrored shine of that era and with candy-coated power pop hooks everywhere, was pure sugar to my ears as an 11-year-old, and still is 20 years later. All this to say, if our K-pop stars are gonna start pilfering from that sonic landscape going forward like Soyeon does for “퇴사할게여,” then I might as well just hand over my credit card info now. This is an absolute care-free delight.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’ve noted many times before that this is exactly the kind of song that’s hardest to write about: Soyeon here is so effortlessly charming over such cleanly hooky production that there is absolutely nothing to comment on. It’s a song that is beautiful the same way my induction burner or rice cooker is beautiful; if I could note any particular qualities that I liked, it would break the spell.
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