Marta vs K-Pop #7 ⋅ A Very Nice Fire Truck

Why So Lonely — Wonder Girls

Since their last line-up change, Wonder Girls have become the best thing to happen to Wonder Girls. Both last year’s Reboot and their new effort Why So Lonely? were almost entirely made up by songs written by the quartet, and their sound has become a million times more distinctive and interesting.

While I Feel You (a brilliant song and an instant classic) and the rest of Reboot were explicitly 1980s synth pop-inspired, the three songs of EP Why So Lonely? have different 1970s flavours and they all fit them just as amazingly. Why So Lonely? is reggae-inspired, Beautiful Boy is great mellow pop, Sweet & Easy drifts towards disco (and mentions Nutella, therefore is my favourite).

Wonder Girls have already said that they have a lot of other less summery songs in store, so I am excited to see what other brilliant material they will come up with later in the year (and if more man-hating will ensue).

아주 NICE — Seventeen

I will never get bored of Seventeen. They are the whole package: ridiculously talented, ridiculously funny, ridiculously well produced and branded. Comeback after comeback, they have built one of the most distinctive images in rookie k-pop, despite steering clear of anything outrageous/sexy.

아주 NICE is the lead single of the repackaged version of their 2016 album Love & Letter. The song itself is monstrously catchy, piling hook after hook; the MV has a crisp choreography and plenty of room for the members to be as silly as possible with their confetti-shooting hearts.

The repackage has other four new songs, and they are all very good. My favourite is definitely Healing, but I was also so pleased to see that Seventeen’s polymath Woozi got a solo song. No F.U.N. (which is a pre-debut song) and Space are two great hard-hitting tracks (for Seventeen) that counterbalance the other cheesier songs, like Chuck did for Pretty U in the original album.

For as hard as I try, I can’t find any faults with Seventeen. Each of their releases is better than the previous, and they always manage to stay fresh without altering their image more than strictly necessary.

Fire Truck — NCT 127

I’ve been obsessed with NCT U’s The 7th Sense since the day it was released. The song and the video were so good they convinced me to tangentially follow NCT, however unclear their concept. I ended up becoming quite the fan, both theirs and of the other undebuted SM Rookies / potential members.

I followed the unveiling of their second unit NCT 127 with trepidation, and was already slightly disappointed when it was announced that four out of seven members were lifted from NCT U, and that neither of veteran trainees Hansol and Johnny would debut.

I was even more disappointed when I actually saw NCT 127’s comeback / debut earlier this week. First of all, I have to say I really like Fire Truck in itself; I don’t think it’s as good at The 7th Sense, but it’s a fun song with a different flavour from most of what I’ve heard recently. I can see myself jamming to it for the rest of the year.

However, this was the wrong song for NCT 127’s debut. The song does a bad job of showcasing the members’ abilities and ends up penalizing most of them: I love Taeyong and Mark’s rapping styles and I’m always glad to see them shine, but it makes no sense to give rap verses to powerful vocalists like Jaehyun and Taeil (see Without You).

If I didn’t know them already, I wouldn’t have any idea of what Yuta and Haechan can do, since they get barely any screen time and lines. And Chinese member WinWin? WinWin has maybe two lines.

It’s even more baffling to consider Fire Truck next to their other promoted track, Once Again. This vocal lines of this song make me think it was probably written for EXO circa Call Me Baby era, and repurposed for NCT 127.

The contrast with any of their previous promotions is stark; they are dressed in pastels and singing a mellow, twee pop song with a cutesy choreo. The result is in equal parts jarring and boring.

While I always appreciated NCT’s uniqueness, this performance makes them look like a weak, untalented version of Seventeen (including the cheeky rap à la Vernon). Again, the song does nothing for their vocal skills, the new members get very little exposure and WinWin barely has lines.

Even if they were completely different, The 7th Sense and Without You were somehow part of a coherent promotion. Once Again makes no sense for NCT.

The more NCT promotes, the more I have the impression that SM is using them as lab rats and throwing the weirdest concepts onto them, the outrageous looks, the most incoherent sequence of song releases. Needless to say, I’m not pleased.

I think that all the NCT members who have debuted so far are capable singers/rappers and extraordinary performers. It frustrates me to see that SM favoured the “concept” rather than showcasing its artists at their best.

You will have probably noticed that I haven’t embedded on linked to the actual music video for Fire Truck until now. I can’t point my finger exactly on what in this disjointed mess makes me so uncomfortable, but I don’t really feel like ever watching it again.

I have seen people mentioning the whole white-people-as-props trope, but it’s more than that; in one of the first scenes, seven grown men point water hoses against a little girl. I think there’s some sort of punk / Clockwork Orange-y imagery they wanted to convey, but it clearly went very wrong.

Are Winner coming back yet?

No, but Maetamong TV and 승승TV are happening. Thank you Seunghoon.

This was the first time that Mino’s solo was confirmed by someone semi-believable and apparently it’s really steamy. #ok