Archive for September, 2017
Life Is A Party: Jung Yonghwa’s DO DISTURB and SUMMER CALLING album reviews
Oh my god we did it again, That Girl, 2017
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I ride for Jung Yonghwa, CNBLUE’s leader and lead vocalist, so the recent releases of not one but two of his solo projects have vastly improved my life.
In CNBLUE’s latest releases Yonghwa has experimented with a range of different instrumentations and musical styles, and with both DO DISTURB, his solo Korean album, and SUMMER CALLING, his Japanese release, he further expands his musical repertoire. Yonghwa also continues to collaborate with several producers who each have their own musical style, including Justin Reinstein, the producer of BETWEEN US and IT’S YOU, two of the strongest tracks from CNBLUE’s last release 7°CN. In his two solo albums Yonghwa tests the limits of his pleasantly raspy voice and for the most part the results are impressive, as he goes from deep, throaty growls and soul shouts to high, sustained falsettos.
DO DISTURB opens with THAT GIRL, and this track is without a doubt a smart, sophisticated jam. It’s full of musical tricks and surprises, beginning a funky, thumb-popping guitar lick and a sample that proclaims “Oh my god we did it again.” The track features the rapper Loco and it beautifully mixes in his percussive flow. THAT GIRL has a really strong, deep groove, so momentarily interrupting the flow with a drop right before Loco’s rap, which takes the place of a pre-chorus, breaks up the monotony of the song’s heavy beat. Loco’s rap has a jazzy, freeform style and it makes its appearance in the song like a hard bop transition—sudden, jarring, and without warning, yet completely right. Following this Yonghwa jumps right back in again with the song’s mad catchy chorus, establishing the hook that continues throughout the track. The second time Loco raps it’s equally breathtaking, as most of the instrumentation again drops away and a liquid trap beat rides under his rhymes. This time around, instead of going right into the chorus Yonghwa croons a sexy bridge over the beat that brilliantly links the rap to the melody. He then follows this by belting a powerful sustained note (“tired”) that punches up the energy of the song even more. These crazy switch-ups, with Loco spitting fire, Yonghwa purring and belting, and the insanely hooky backbeat, are what makes this track rise above the usual pop music production and keeps the sound fresh and surprising. The song moves all over the place while remaining anchored to its swinging groove.
The album’s second track, CLOSER, completely changes up the mood. A lush and poppy track produced by Justin Reinstein, the song creates a shimmering, dense soundscape that’s a perfect bed for Yonghwa’s powerful and pristine vocals. The soaring chorus is particularly lovely, as it shifts the song’s chromatics and makes for an exhilarating break. Yonghwa has said that he can write ten songs like this a day, so if he ever decides to stop being a star he’ll never starve because he’s got the three-minute pop song down pat.
The third track, PASSWORD, marries Yonghwa’s vocals to a deep house track and not surprisingly his voice suits the classic house-style production really well, as he alternates between smooth sustained notes, belting, and rhythmic purring. The production on this track has the house sound down perfectly, from the muted horns and flexible bass line to the slight reverb in the vocals on the chorus. The lyrics also match the house style, with a couple nice hits of ra-tata, a few sweet woohoos, and some smexy English (“baby, turn me on”). This song is made for the clubs and it sounds like Yonghwa had a lot of fun singing it. Yet under the housey mix the song is actually quite jazzy.
The fourth track, NAVIGATION, is one of those out-of-left-field songs that defies classification. I don’t even know how to describe this song, it’s so astoundingly strange. Yonghwa has made a song based on GPS voices and it works perfectly as a dreamlike track that feels like driving down the road to nowhere. The English refrain “left to the right, up to the down” perfectly encapsulates geographic dyslexia as well as Yonghwa’s peculiarly sideways thinking. Songs like this and ROYAL RUMBLE, last year’s standout track from both EUPHORIA and 7°CN, demonstrate how startlingly unexpected Yonghwa’s tunes can be.
Something has happened to Yonghwa’s voice over the past couple years and that is that he’s become an excellent singer. He’s always been a good rock vocalist, with a flexibility and ferocity in his delivery, but on DO DISTURB he’s suddenly become amazing at other genres as well. This is especially evident in NOT ANYMORE, a mid-tempo 90s throwback R&B jam where his vocal virtuosity is off the hook. On this track Yonghwa effortlessly ranges from sultry crooning to belting to beautifully sustained high notes, bending the melody at the climax and hitting a gorgeous falsetto at the top of the song. Like Stevie Wonder, his voice is full of melodic flexibility, supple and smooth in one moment, then ragged, raw, and full of passion in the next. The only time he falters somewhat is on the very highest notes, where there are some signs of strain in his voice and the richness found in his mid and lower register is absent.
DO DISTURB’s closing track, LOST IN TIME, is absolutely gorgeous. This is what Yonghwa can do. Even before I read the translation of the lyrics, Yonghwa’s plaintive, emotional delivery effectively conveyed the melancholy of the simple, evocative melody. His vocals are completely on point in this song, with a stunning octave jump and a beautiful sustained high note at the crescendo, his tone and vibrato gorgeous, rich, and full of emotion. I suspect that this song would have been released as a single if it wasn’t so stylistically similar to ONE FINE DAY, the title track from Yonghwa’s previous solo release. In order to avoid pigeonholing he likely wanted to get away from releasing emo ballads and instead focus on a different kind of tune.
In addition to DO DISTURB, which was released in the Korean market, Yonghwa also dropped SUMMER CALLING in Japan about a month after DO DISTURB. As well as four tracks from DO DISTURB, the album also includes three other songs that demonstrate his further growth as an artist. All three of the additional tracks are completely in English and each has a very different sound from the others.
The title track, SUMMER DREAM (produced by Reinstein) is a fast-paced song that includes some rapid-fire English lyrics that demonstrate a vast improvement in Yonghwa’s English-language skills. Beginning with SOMEONE ELSE, the b-side from this spring’s CNBLUE Japanese single SHAKE, Yonghwa has suddenly become fluent in writing in English. Whether or not he’s getting a little help from an uncredited collaborator, his English lyrics are now really, really good and his previous awkwardness with the language has vanished for the most part. Not only is he much more fluent but he now can use English the way that he uses Korean, musically and poetically as opposed to only being about the meaning of the words. SUMMER DREAM’s imagery is strong and consistent throughout and the song’s lyrics turn on a dime. For example, the song repeats this couplet twice:
If we could stay forever bound
Could stop the world from turning ’round
In its third iteration this variation appears:
I wish I knew a way around
Could stop the world from turning ‘round
This alternates with this couplet, also repeated twice, at the same point in the melody.
I burn the moment in my mind
I feel our hearts are intertwined
Again there is a slight variation in the lyrics in the third iteration.
I burn the moment in my mind
A time again I’ll never find
These slight yet sophisticated changes make the song’s story progress from hope to resignation and move the mood from joy to sadness and from hope of the future to longing for the past. The song’s driving beat and the rapidity of the lyrics also suggest the inevitability of loss. It’s a beautifully structured song that demonstrates Yonghwa’s mastery of melody, lyrics, and performance.
The two other English-language tracks on SUMMER CALLING are equally interesting. Though Yonghwa has been compared to Bruno Mars, in these two songs I’m hearing a bit of another famous mixed-race polyhyphenate, the legendary Prince.
LIFE IS A PARTY opens with Yonghwa flexing his falsetto as he effortlessly swings through this flirty, dancey tune. The lyrics show off a pleasant swagger as Yonghwa confidently explains why he’s the superior choice of a mate.
I don’t do this for just anyone
But I know that he can’t be the one for you, girl
(Come on)
With the setting of the summer sun, I toast my glass and fight
“Everybody living it up, until I’ve got you, I’ll never stop”
Life is a party
Don’t you waste it with him, darling
Yonghwa’s sweet cockiness and his clear, flute-like falsetto, along with the track’s spare, funky synth-based production, calls to mind Prince’s Minneapolis sound.
MAKE YOU MINE similarly echoes Prince tracks like LITTLE RED CORVETTE and IF I WAS YOUR GIRLFRIEND. Though not as overtly smexy as the Purple One’s, Yonghwa’s lyrics are still mildly racy and create vivid word pictures.
Slowly tracin’ all the droplets
As they’re drippin’ off your hair it’s
So amazing how you find
Another way to blow my mind
Artistic growth, Yonghwa, 2017
Yonghwa has recently stated that his current favorite song is DESPACITO, Luis Fonsi’s Spanish-language mega-hit. He may like the song for its music but he also has to be aware that this is one of the few non-English language songs to cross over to mainstream success in the US and around the world. His fondness for the track may reflect some of his own longing to gain global popularity and break through the cultural and language barriers still holding back Korean musical acts in the US. His fellow Kpop star G-dragon (leader of BIGBANG) is currently on a world tour that’s been selling out most of its venues, with the notable exception of some of its North America dates, attesting to the difficulties Asian stars continue to face in breaking into the US market. Despite this history, South Korean rapper Jay Park has just signed to Jay Z’s label Roc Nation and Kpop boy group of the moment BTS collaborated with The Chainsmokers’ Andrew Taggart on their latest release. Yonghwa may get lucky and grab the brass ring in the US sometime, but until then he’s selling out shows and otherwise doing just fine across Asia, both with CNBLUE and on his own.
With these two solo releases Yonghwa is clearly enjoying spreading his wings and continuing to expand his musical horizons. In THAT GIRL’s music video he even manages some passable dancing, which is a pretty far reach from CNBLUE’s usual rock band turf.
CNBLUE just dropped a new song, STARTING OVER, which mixes a retro Ray Charles-inspired piano line with Yonghwa’s sweet, soulful vocals and which takes the band’s sound in yet another direction. It’s a pleasure see Yonghwa continue to challenge himself and take creative risks, which can only bode well for his ongoing artistic growth. I can’t wait to hear what he comes up with next.
Rebel Without A Pause: Why we need GOOK
The Korean American view, GOOK, 2017
Just caught a matinee of Justin Chon’s film GOOK at the Alamo Drafthouse here in San Francisco. Although the movie is a bit rough around the edges for the most part it’s an absorbing and successfully mounted film that focuses on the Korean American perspective of a particularly fraught moment in US history.
The film follows Eli and Daniel, a pair of Korean American brothers who run a small and funky shoe store in Paramount, an unincorporated area bordering South Central Los Angeles. It’s set during the civil unrest in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of the four LAPD officers caught on camera beating unarmed motorist Rodney King, but most of that action takes place offscreen. Instead the film miniaturizes the conflicts that occurred during that time, focusing on a small group of individuals repping for the entire city of Los Angeles. Several times characters refer to action taking place in South Central but aside from a few digitally added columns of smoke on the distant horizon we don’t actually see any widespread violence. This is no doubt in part due to the film’s indie budget which probably precluded any large-scale set pieces of buildings on fire or shit getting fucked up. So we get a couple broken windows, some beatdowns, a few guns being fired into the air, and other incidents that gesture toward the greater unrest without actually staging any of the mass devastation and destruction that took place during that time.
Time and place, GOOK, 2017
Justin Chon does a good job with his actors (himself included) and demonstrates that he has an eye for time and place in the worn-out, working class neighborhood he places his story in. He’s also got the 1990s kicks fetish down pat as one of the narrative threads turns on the acquisition of several pairs of expensive sneakers. The film’s art direction also works hard, with baggy jeans, overalls, and asymmetrical jheri-curl hairstyles capturing the period’s fashion sensibilities. Although I have some issues with the resolution of the character arc of Kamilla, the young African American teen who befriends Eli and Daniel, for the most part Chon directs with a steady hand and maintains a tone of tense wariness in the film’s multiethnic milieu.
And like MOONLIGHT, which the film in some way resembles, there are no white people in the movie, which attests to the racial and social stratification that led to the explosion of tensions in 1992 following the verdict that acquitted Officers Powell, Wind, Koons, and Briseno of beating Rodney King. Instead the film tells its story from a Korean American POV, one which has for the most part been lacking in mainstream depictions of the 1992 unrest. This omission is especially glaring considering the fact that the Korean American community suffered huge property losses during the unrest and that sa-i-gu, or April 29, is considered a watershed moment in the Korean American community.
Important, GOOK, 2017
Even in the 21st century the focus on a Korean American perspective is especially important, and this was all the more apparent to me after watching the ads and trailers that preceded GOOK’s screening at the Alamo. The cinema is a hipster haven located in what used to be a predominantly Latino neighborhood, and I counted exactly one non-white person in the many trailers for the various indie films in the upcoming schedule. Likewise, the ironic midcentury aesthetic of the found footage in-house announcements were decidedly not very diverse. One short clip featured an all-white group of young people from the early 1960s dancing to African American style choreography. This moment was presented without a hint of irony and its glaring cultural appropriation felt decidedly tone-deaf.
So even though I feel like I say this a lot, it clearly bears repeating. Unconscious Eurocentric bias makes it all the more important to support films like GOOK. Now more than ever, as Trumpism threatens to turn back the hard-fought gains of the civil rights movement and its struggles for equality and social justice, we have to keep decentering the master narratives of white hegemony and bring Asian American voices to the fore.
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