Excuse me, can I please talk to you for a minute? You know, your song sounds kinda familiar…
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[5.91]
Jonathan Bradley: “The DJ is Mine” has the incandescent exuberance of previous Wonder Girls single “Be My Baby,” but where that song reverse-engineered classic girl group motifs, this one is thoroughly 2012. More to the point, it’s thoroughly the West’s 2012. “DJ,” with its Auto-Tuned vocals, dubstep influences and buzzing dancefloor synths, all realized with a Britney-like precision, seems targeted to make K-Pop a commercial concern in the Anglosphere. That could be a quixotic task, but the Wonder Girls have the song to do it. The tune is unrelentingly catchy and, with its bizarre sexual payola theme — why not mash up a romantic rivalry with a club-ready DJ shout out? — just silly enough to stick around.
[8]
Jer Fairall: The personality-deprived vocals remind me of any number of turn-of-the-century pop also-rans, the video game samples remind me of the self-satisfied “cleverness” of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the shrill dubstep wobbles remind me all too unpleasantly of right now. This, fellow pop-lovers, is where so many pop-haters go to get their worst prejudices confirmed.
[2]
Iain Mew: What is going on in this song? I mean, you could just read it as one ridiculously over-extended metaphor. In “He only rocks to my music/He loves the way I do it all night” it’s probably not music that she’s doing all night. Come the rap bit, “I’m what he’s listening to/I’m blasting through his headphones,” it’s even more fun to read the take on his obsession more literally. Has she been recording tapes of herself singing and secretly playing them to him all night to get into his subconscious? Has she been singing her massive club hit to him during sex so every time he has to play it at work he can’t help but be reminded of her? The possibilities are great and delivered adeptly by a group with distinctive and enjoyable voices over a frantic track punctuated by stunning blasts of wobbly bass and electronic shattered glass. It reminds me of Labrinth/Tinie, with the same feel of a public service announcement about how awesome they are.
[9]
Brad Shoup: A major subtext here is the primacy of the Wonder Girls — their radio cachet — but the appearance of School Gyrls cuts the legs off that idea. Why did JYP acquiesce to a guest appearance from a group with no pop hits and a flop of a debut film? Are they hedging their bets with lines delivered by native English speakers? Perhaps it’s a challenge: if the Wonder Girls bewitch DJs as they claim, they can elevate their unremarkable co-stars (the awesomeness of “Detention” notwithstanding). Regardless, the track empties its trick-bin within the first quarter-minute, unless you’re counting the awful “lalalalalalalala,” which I don’t.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: “The DJ Is Mine” is the Wonder Girls’ big U.S. push only in the sense that a Nickelodeon movie can be a “big push.” Most of the States will never hear it, and the Nick audience will or won’t depending on a thousand factors they don’t control. Furthermore, it’s only nominally K-pop, meaning it loses interest for those who exoticize the genre. Instead, it’s practically a prototype of pop in the U.S. in 2012: beats better suited to fitness than dance clubs and vocals sugared with autotune and cooked to soft syrup. This frontloads its dubstuff instead of tucking it under the bridge, and it’s got some feature someplace by the queasily named School Gyrls (theory: replacing any vowel with a Y makes the resulting word instantly sleazy), but otherwise, it’s all stock parts. Good thing they’re in pristine condition.
[7]
Frank Kogan: Beautifully arranged, with twisted-tight dubstep leading us to smoothly unwinding dance beats while a spectral synthesizer paints spiderwebs across the sky. But the singing, though plenty dexterous (“bada dadada dadumdum” and “spinning and grinning I’m winning him” skip across the pond with ease), ends up pale, not ghostly but blank, the Wonder Girls’ wispy gravity turning mundane in the move from Korean to English. Arbitrary Greay may have it right in saying that, whereas someone more comfortable in the language would feel free to smudge up the sound, the Wonder Girls’ pronunciation is too spot-on. I don’t know if this would bother me on the dance floor, but here on the home typewriter, a good track doesn’t get great.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Sketchy music-as-warm-body conceit aside, these girls deserve more than this generic example of disco 2010, and occasionally I did catch a wonder: the distorted la-la-la-la-la’s, the okay rap interlude.
[4]
John Seroff: “He knows me, he holds me from intro to fade” is quality top-40 poetry. Aside from a slight, buttery pat of vocal and lyrical elan, most everything else in “DJ Is Mine” sounds poached from the recycling bin of a very upscale building. Even so, rich people throw out the most amazing stuff.
[6]
Alex Ostroff: Obnoxiously dubstepped though it may be, “The DJ is Mine” is also a marvelous piece of throwback schaffel — a sound for sore ears trapped in 4×4 times. The featured presence of the orthographically awkward School Gyrls would be to the track’s detriment if it didn’t let me imagine this as a Girls vs. Gyrls DJ battle à la Brandy & Monica (or Usher & R.) It’s certainly not the best song with amorous intentions directed DJ-ward, but halfway between Cassie’s “In Love with the DJ” (perfect) and Nadia Oh’s “DJ’s Girlfriend” (decent) isn’t a bad place to be.
[8]
Michaela Drapes: Surely overseas talent houses/promoters are more in touch with what sells in America; or is that not the point? The Wonder Girls could have enough success in the U.S. reaching an audience with material in their native language instead of trying to be some version of American pop that hasn’t been successful for over a decade. It doesn’t help that the School Gyrls are similarly trapped in the same Teen Nick-enabled bizarro mall pop timewarp. Too grown-up for Radio Disney and too immature for mainstream success, I’m at a loss to understand how this could ever be seen as a good career move for anyone involved.
[2]
Jonathan Bogart: When will people attempting to break America learn from Shakira? The best thing to do is not to play it safe, it’s to be as weird as you are, offer the big nation something they’ve never heard before. There’s no breasts so small and humble that they can’t be confused with mountains here, just very classicist dance-pop songwriting, some strong sass, a double rap break that proves it was recorded in the twenty-first century, and a thin production that doesn’t dare to step on the singers’ toes. The result is still pretty great — Wonder Girls are great — but it could have been so much more.
[7]