This must have left some impact on me. It was the winning song from the 2007 Eurovision, which became the last i ever got to see through us losing our SBS reception and me somehow never being home Eurovision weekend. And i haven’t heard it since. This song was the Serbian entry and set itself apart from the competition by being a ballad, its stage having no choreography, and the song being sung entirely in its home language. That’s all i remember of it, and, Eurovision being what it is to us, it’s the only Marija Šerifović song i’ve ever heard despite her having i’m sure a very successful and prolific career.
The first Comet Gain song?! Yikes. This thing is really not at all indicative of what i listen to outside of it. Well i guess it is, but there are bands who haven’t shown up here that by all sound logic should have left some trace given the amount of time i spend with them. Comet Gain for one. These singles that tided us over in the gap between City Fallen Leaves (where i got on) and last year’s Howl Of The Lonely Crowd are wonderful things indeed. Little reminders that they were still a band, every bit as much still Comet Gain – that there exists a Comet Gain in this world.
The best thing about Sweet Baby, apart from the songs, is the way Dallas and Matt share lead vocal duties. The same melody line and lyrics sung with the same notes and the same urgency. It doesn’t always happen – Matt often settling into backing up, harmonising or yelping, and that obviously being his role in the band – but when it does, when this unison troubadouring attack of love and devotion issues from them, it’s a magical thing indeed.
So the Douglas Sirk, Preston Sturges or [better example] (to twist a dream of auteurism to somewhere it doesn’t really exist) of dramas, or the Shadow Morton of K-pop. This is again from You’re Beautiful, done by the fictional band the show’s based around. They’re really popular in the show but i’ll never get it, just like i will never get CNBlue or F.T. Island. These names…
I’m coming to a point in my life where i’m beginning to realise that i do have dreams regarding what i want to do with it and maybe for once i should pursue them, no matter how stupid and unattainable they are. A desperate point. I’m getting old and i’ve spent that getting old thinking small, thinking safe, thinking dull, thinking that which i would have to try and exert the least, and i haven’t even made it there. I’m going back to school soon, but i think even that is filing in for an unimaginative, direct, inferior career path.
What i would like to do… ready?.. Really, one thing i would like to do is write for television. Specifically Korean television. I want to write dramas. That is what i want to do. I have good ideas, and i believe the only place suitable for and accepting of these ideas is Korean television. Maybe there are other places. It sure ain’t Australia. What walls i put up for myself.
What walls? There are things i have to do. Flesh out these ideas for starters – actually write something. There are probably academic credentials i should get as well. But beyond all that there’s me being a non-Korean wanting to enter an industry where the only white people seem to be English teachers recruited as background actors for scenes set overseas. No matter how universal love, romance, comedy and drama may be, i would have to learn the language and all sense of filial duty, social propriety, the way the country – geography, infrastructure, history and culture – positions people, and the (to us) weird, open relation to bodily functions, especially poop.
There are many ways this dream is closed to me, but thinking that way is not going to get me anywhere. It’s an industry that will thrive without me, but still one i would like so much to enter. And one i believe i can contribute to. It’s an industry that has a proper path to follow for those to be where i want to be, and i am not on it. Maybe i can Cyrano de Bergerac my scripts to someone. I don’t mind giving up credit. This song is from the 2009 drama You’re Beautiful.
There is little more exhilarating than the quick-cutting archival footage of Giorgio Moroder swiveling in his studio chair to another piece of equipment, probably to do something really boring and pain-staking on it. I think i’d like to spend my life in a studio, but one with banks of humming machinery, not one sole computer, no matter how much it makes everything easier. Better me there than on the dance floor where these constructions are intended.
The genesis. Not alone, and there was teen-directed pop music in Korea before this, but Fin.K.L and other groups like them born from a similar time and similar commercial urgency were really the first wave of K-pop. And it so evidently was. It’s so amazing to see now how ingrained to memory these groups and these songs are among Korean people today.* – how important they were, and how much of an arrival it was and the sense of identity it brought.
It seems so quaint to look at it now, everything not as perfected, the simple dances, the outfits, etc. It goes to show how long ago the late 90′s/early 00′s were. A generation ago. Really. And that generation grew up and became today’s stars. It is a little more polished now, many lessons have been learned, but the same impetus and effect drives it. See how dated everything here looks in 2020, and the groups then who are only children now – dreams shaped, lives changed, hearts struck by today’s.
* this is gleaned from the many videos of this song and others of this wave i’ve seen performed now and what they trigger in the audience and performers alike. Of course not every Korean person, but there is a palpable sense of the meaning and effect this met with many a person’s youth.
I wish i could understand this behind the English parts. I have such hopes for it, it’s stance and message, but i worry that hope might betrayed by lyrics i can’t understand. It happens often. On the surface and to a non-Korean speaker such assertive and cool things being mitigated, excused or having their context shifted to the same old. There are ways this could be twisted away into something so disappointing.
Maybe i want it so much i project my desire on to it. But it must exist. Even thinking solely from a marketing point, it must. For one song at least. We can apologise and step back in line with our next single. “You don’t know me, so shut up, boy” is, sadly, such a rare and exciting posture in Korean pop music. And it was Miss A’s debut song! Coming into the world, pointing fingers, and saying barely “Shut up!” I just want so much for it exist directly and firmly throughout as i hope it does.
How many bands are there in the world? Every time someone, somewhere picks up something and makes a song with it, and all the ears that never hear it. This is the only Enjin song i have heard, and for all i know the only that exists. It is one of the greatest songs i have ever heard. I know i say that a lot… I mean it.
I found it on a tape compilation called Deliberately Lo-Fi i downloaded in my quest to hear every Boyracer song ever recorded. Their Glamour On A Shoe String was worth it, but this song was something else. On first listen, and without any connection to an important moment in my life, i had to re-evaluate my top χ songs of all time.
It seems so appropriate that the greatest song should be buried in a tape compilation, made and released from someone’s bedroom, organised through the post, all for something to do, some feeling of vitality, connectedness. No matter how infinitesimal the reach, how pointless the effort.
It is not much of a song, it may not have been much of a band – Enjin just being some guy and a 4 track – and it isn’t very well recorded. It is nothing remarkable, but it is in total perfect and i get a height of feeling from it so rarely reached. The last time i felt so swept was the first time i heard Lync’s Pan. It’s not quite as good as that. A notch or two below. A notch or two below absolute perfection.
“A deeply melodic hardcore band with basslines that twisted all around your skull, these songs were gems boiled down to one or two minute epics.“
As with so many of these bands, for the longest time the only hint i had as to how Mohinder sounded was a coalescence of my own imagined estimation (usually way off) and the description of them of the FourFa site. It was a different time, when everything wasn’t on Megaupload (a single tear), before the Paint It Black or even Humble Pie record stores had opened up, before i was savvy or had money enough to find these discography CD’s. It was discography CD’s back then. Nevermind the original records.
So my imagination swelled for years until finally i heard them and realised how mislead i was. And how otherwise, uniquely and truly great Mohinder were. The basslines were there and were every bit as twisty. The only thing that doesn’t seem to fit from that above description is “deeply melodic” – unless i’m reading it wrong and it’s a case of melody being buried so deep it’s indiscernible. I just wasn’t prepared, even with Heroin and Swing Kids and Saetia shaping this branch of emo for me prior, for how Mohinder would sound. It’s simple: Octave chords, stop/starting, fast-as-you-can drumming, the bass – yet like nothing else.
