Mixtapemotions

  • “Never Ending Song” by Conan Gray, Monday, June 10, 2024

    Conan Gray released his third album, Found Heaven April 5th this year. The album is a departure from Gray’s music before the singles were released starting with the album’s lead single from last May, “Never Ending Song.” The ‘80s-inspired dance-pop track treads on “maximalist” pop (more on that later) the singer flirted with once on the teen anthem “Maniac” on his 2020 debut album Kid Krow, but much of Gray’s early music was emotional acoustic music like his biggest song, “Heather.” Working with producer Dan Nigro, the producer behind Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, on his first two albums fleshed out Gray as a queer-coded Gen-Z singer-songwriter. The third album is a fun excursion into ‘80s glam rock and synth-pop, and it’s pure pop-rock heaven. 

    I SAW YOUR FACE IN A MAGAZINE TODAY. Conan Gray didn’t return to work with Dan Nigro on his third album. He told Billboard News that he had begun writing the album while on tour with his second album Superache. He talks about it being the first time that he fell in love. He says that all songs before Found Heaven were just his speculation about what love might feel like—similar to the theme of his song “People Watching”— but the album is about a real love story. In the early writing process, he knew he wanted to write a pop record. To make this pop record, Gray worked with some of the biggest pop producers including Max Martin, Greg Kurstin, Shawn Everett, Ilya Salmanzadeh, Oscar Holter, Fat Max Gsusm, and Luka Kloser. Each producer brings a slightly different sound to Gray’s album. Greg Kurstin’s Elton John-inspired track “Alley Cat” and the final track “Winner” bring Gray back to his singer-songwriter roots. The Shawn Everett tracks “Found Heaven” and “Eye of the Night” bring a Queen-inspired sound to the album. But the glue of the album has to be the songs produced by Max Martin and his associates. 

    TRIED TO TURN THE PAGE, BUT OUR STORY WASN’T STOPPIN’. Conan Gray is still an up-and-coming pop star. And while he is TikTok famous, I was baffled by how he got Max Martin to produce much of his third album, Found Heaven. While the album charted higher than any of Gray’s previous records, Found Heaven was certainly a low-key album of an active early 2024. Gray told Zach Sang that the Martin collaboration came about because Gray had worked with other artists in Max’s studios for years. The album produced no Billboard Hot 100 hits, not even for the producer with the most Billboard number ones. I think the album is a fun experiment in campy music inspired by the ‘80s. Maybe Conan Gray isn’t the next Freddie Mercury, but his charisma and impeccable fashion sense are iconic nonetheless. The music video for “Never Ending Song” sets the mood for the album with Gray entering a grocery store in a leather jacket 10 minutes before the store closes. Dancing in the middle of the dairy aisle connects the kitschy and the catchy. I’m not sure if there will be a revival of Found Heaven in terms of a radio campaign, but there is certainly an absence of pop stars like Conan Gray. There are still no mainstream Asian American chart staples. Hopefully, Gray breaks through with a force that goes on and on.



  • “ Easy” (Remix) by Troye Sivan ft. Kacey Musgraves & Mark Ronson, Sunday, June 9, 2024 (repost)

    Last October, Troye Sivan released his first full-length record since 2018’s Bloom.  While other pop stars have entered prolific eras with frequent releases, fans have had to wait a long time for new music from Sivan. His last major release was an EP in 2020 titled In a Dream, but the singer has been releasing singles since then; however, whether or not they will be part of the upcoming work is yet to be disclosed. Sivan’s sophomore LP, Bloom, was a celebration of love and gay sex; however, In a Dream is an introspective collection of songs–with the exception of “Stud“–dealing with heartache and a failing relationship. 


    TELL ME WE’LL MAKE IT THROUGH. The single “Easy” is the second track on In a Dream. The song was remixed by producer Mark Ronson and features a verse by Kacey Musgraves. Sivan had appeared on Musgrave’s second Christmas album in 2019, and the reunion between the two singers on the 2020 single not only coincided with Sivan’s breakup with model Jacob Bixenman but also Musgraves’ divorce which would later be artistically analyzed on her 2021 record star-crossed. “Easy” is a song about trying to hold onto a relationship. The remix is a little faster than the original, and other than featuring the production of Ronson and the additional vocals of Musgraves, the second verse of the songs are different. Sivan sings more about the ending of his relationship on verse two in the original version, while Musgraves sings different lyrics on the remix. While Sivan uses the pronoun he in the first verse in both versions, Musgraves addition makes the song sound like a break up duet about a straight or straight-passing relationship. 

    PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME. Complicating the meaning even more is the Musgraves-Sivan music video, which opens with “Part II,” presumably the second part to original song and original video which features Sivan in an empty house watching a bizarre ’80s music video with him in dyed red hair. The original video, released during the Covid quarantine, felt isolating, and breaking up with someone during that time was very hard. You couldn’t just go to the bar or meet someone on an app; instead you were left indoors wallowing in your heartbreak. The sequel, though, sees Sivan in a Nashville dive bar, sporting a mullet. While cowboys and cowgirls are line dancing, a drag queen Jorgeous sings “Easy” karaoke-style, though looking dejected. Meanwhile, we see Sivan and Musgraves traveling from cheap motel to cheap motel with eerie CSI-styled flashes, making the audience feel that something sinister is going on. Sivan and Musgraves appear platonic in the video. They go from dive bar to dive bar. Sivan mostly just watches from the sidelines, though sometimes dances. Musgraves flirts with men provocatively. However, both end up together, sleeping in the same motel queen-sized bed. Sivan explained to Vogue that the characters that he and Musgraves portray have “separately had our own experiences, regrets, scorned our lovers and will find solace in each other.” 



  • “You Get Me” by TWICE, Saturday, June 8, 2024

    Twice became one of the biggest K-pop girl groups in South Korea in 2016 with their number one song “Cheer Up.” The group debuted in 2015 on JYP Entertainment. President Jin-young Park announced that the label would debut a new girl group, formed through a survival competition show called Sixteen, which aired on Mnet. By the end of the show, seven members completed Twice, but Park announced that the group would expand to nine members, adding Taiwanese member Tzuyu (Chou Tzu-yu), as a fan-favorite, and Japanese singer Momo Hirai, whom Park thought was a strong performer that the group needed. The nine singers have been performing to this day as Twice, and still continue to produce hits, coming back this year with their EP With YOU-th. 


    WHERE ON EARTH IS THIS? Girl groups in South Korea often have a hard time winning the hearts of the teenagers. Boy bands tend to sell more concert tickets, albums, and merchandise. The primary sales go to the teen girls with pocket money. While teenage Korean boys may spend their money on girl group posters or merchandise, they typically don’t spend the money to attend girl group concerts, opting to spend their money on video games. Korean teenage girls may support girl groups, sing their songs, and attend their concerts, but the big money comes from boy bands. This is, of course, broadly speaking, as there are certainly Korean teenagers that don’t fit this stereotype, but purely looking at the K-pop market, these trends seem to make sense, even as fourth-generation K-pop girl groups now tend to market toward girls. Still, according to a 2022 article published by Korea JoongAng Daily, boy groups still make most of the money.


    LATELY I’VE BEEN FEELING LIKE EVERYTHING’S ENOUGH. In 2015, Twice was given the name “The Nation’s Girl Group” in South Korea. The group also has a massive following in Japan and have expanded into other overseas markets. Twice was one of the girl groups I remember from their inception. I remember my students, particularly the male students enamored with the pretty girls. As the article in Korea JoongAng Daily talks about, the third-generation girl groups marketed sexuality to mostly a male audience. Twice was cute, whereas their predecessors were enjoyed by older men, and not so much for their music. Girls, too, loved the catchy choruses of Twice. But Twice’s popularity was eclipsed when BLACKPINK debuted in 2016. Yes, these two groups co-existed, and Twice still remained a powerful hit producer, but the kids loved BLACKPINK in a way I hadn’t experienced love for a girl group before. And who loved the YG Entertainment girl group the most—the female students. With the rise of the new generation of girl groups comes the message of female empowerment and gender equality in the groups’ lyrics, but also a renewed scrutiny of the possibly unethical training processes that both male and female stars must undergo before a debut. But with the issues of male conscription, I’ve wondered if girl groups would be a more profitable future for K-pop. Only time will tell.

    Read the Korean lyrics on Genius.
     Read the English translation on Genius.

  • “Lucky Girl Syndrome” by ILLIT, Friday, June 7, 2024

    I’ll-It, later known as ILLIT, was formed with the winning members of the 2023 South Korean survival competition show R U Next? The show was broadcast JTBC and streamed on Netflix and Wavve beginning June 30, 2023. Along with JTBC, the show was created by Belift Lab, a sublabel of Hybe, the label responsible for introducing the world to BTS and NewJeans. Six winners were selected by the end of the show and those members became ILLIT, a K-pop girl group who just scored a Billboard Hot 100 entry on their first single–an accomplish-ment, a first of its kind. “Magnetic” is one of the biggest K-pop songs now, and other songs from Hybe Corporation are charting high in Korea and other countries. But as the label has brought K-pop to its imperial phase, ILLIT has come under fire as an imitation of the label’s other successful girl group, NewJeans.


    I DON’T NEED ANY GOLDEN TICKET. Hybe Corporation began as Big Hit Entertainment in 2005. The label signed their first act, 8Eight in 2007. Big Hit’s first big hit came in 2013 when BTS debuted. After several other idol groups, some of which were embroiled with scandal, Big Hit signed Tomorrow X Together in 2019 to a runway success. With the growing success of K-pop in America, in February 2021, Big Hit made a deal with Universal Music, to market music in both America and Korea. Then, in March, Big Hit announced that they would rebrand as Hybe. The label’s new strategy was multiple sub-labels. Each sub-label was run by its own CEO, but all were under the leadership of Hybe founder Bang Si-hyuk(방시혁). The company had been making headlines this spring because of an issue with the CEO of sub-label Ador, Min Hee Jin (민희진). Min was hired after working for SM Entertainment as she was responsible for the branding of some of the label’s biggest acts including Girls’ Generation, Exo, f(x), SHINee, and Red Velvet. When she began work for Hybe, Min demanded that she be named the CEO of her own label, and that label released NewJeans’ music.  Now, this spring, Bang and Min are in the middle of a legal battle which is still unfolding, with accusations between Bang and Min at the forefront of the case. Min claims she raised concerns about Bang copying her signature style, which was applied to Belift’s ILLIT. Bang claimed that Min was seeking independence of Ador and ordered an audit of the sub-label. 


     THE WORLD IS CHOCOLATE; LET’S SAVOR IT. The details of the case are quite intriguing; I wouldn’t be surprised to see a documentary or a drama with a plot heavily borrowed from the allegations—specifics changed, of course. The case of ILLIT, though, raises the question about how much a company can take from its workers. I’ve been blogging a lot about K-pop the past few months, and I’ve taken more and more interest in the corporate structure of the industry. K-pop seems to be somewhat based on a pre-2008 understanding of American record labels, and the art of K-pop is as much visual and merdandizing as it is about the music itself. That makes Min Hee-jin one of if not the primary artist for NewJeans. But can the parent company take Min’s ideas and apply them to ILLIT? And what about the listeners? Will they tolerate a clone of another group? The member’s personalities have to be a driving force of the groups moving forward. As for ILLIT vs. NewJeans, both groups offer a similar subdued catchiness. Often when I first hear a NewJeans song, I think it’s not that good, but catch myself humming it all day after just a cursory listen. The same goes for ILLIT’s “Magnetic” and today’s song, “Lucky Girl Syndrome.” As a former hipster, indie snob, it was the earworms of K-pop that made me start taking the industry seriously. In a time when Western pop music is shedding melody for monotonous simplicity, K-pop leaves an impression due to how easily it’s stuck in the listener’s head. And that’s a “Lucky” place to be. 


    Check out the English translation.


    Check out the lyrics on Genius.




     

     

  • “Ojos Marrones” by Lasso ft. Sebastián Yatra, Thursday, June 6, 2024 + Música Española Favorita Playlist

    Venezuelan-born, Mexico-City based artist Andrés Vicente de Jesús Lazo Uslar goes by the name Lasso. He’s been recording since 2009, releasing four studio albums. His latest, Eva, was released last year. Teaming up with Colombian singer Sebastián Yatra on a re-recorded version of his hit “Ojos Marrones” as a bonus track on Eva. I instantly connected with the song’s forlorn guitar which plays throughout the song. The atmosphere of the song reminded me of both Deas Vail’s “Wake Up and Sleep” and Taylor Swift’s Speak Now Vault version “I Can See You,” on which Jack Antonoff plays a guitar in a similar, mysterious way. The slight rasp of Lasso’s voice brings the melancholy romantic lyrics to life. This is the first Spanish language song I’ve blogged about. I’ve been getting into some Spanish songs lately, so today I’m going to make a playlist of some of my recent finds. I hope you enjoy them too. 


    Check out the playlist on Spotify.



     

  • “Loser” by BigBang (빅뱅), Wednesday, June 5, 2024

    BTS’s international success didn’t happen without precedent. One of the biggest international Korean pop successes before the boys in  Bangtan Sonyeodan topped Billboard’s Hot 100 was YG Entertainment’s BigBang. The group has been called the “Kings of K-pop” especially with the hit singles following their 2006 debut album BigBang Vol.1. The group has had 11 number 1 singles in South Korea. The group has taken several lengthy hiatuses; however, each comeback proved the group’s lasting impression on Korean popular music. Throughout the group’s career, though, the members have endured scandal, from drugs to an infamous case of prostitution. 


    HONESTLY, THE WORLD AND ME DON’T MATCH.  BigBang’s status right now is uncertain with all members fulfilling their contracts with YG Entertainment and being removed from the label’s roster. Seungri (승리)retired from music following his scandal in 2019. T.O.P (탑) left the group when he fulfilled his contract with YG. Remaining are Taeyang (태양), Daesung (대성), and band leader and chief songwriter G- Dragon(지드래곤). With only a single released in 2022 following the group’s finishing conscription and scandals, the group has experienced a fallow period far beyond any of the group’s previous multi-year hiatuses. The second longest hiatus lasted between 2013 and 2015, when G-Dragon said that he experienced a “career slump,” unable to write material for the group’s next project, which resulted in a delayed follow up record. But in 2015, the group was ready to make their comeback. The group hadn’t released a full record in 9 years, and had decided to release their third album in a series of singles. Eight of the eleven songs on MADE were released two songs at a time. These singles were called M, A, D, E— each one released a month apart starting in May 2015. 


    LIKE SAD CLOWNS IN A SCRIPT.  “Loser” was the first single released on M, the first series of singles from MADE. The full album was delayed to December 2016 because the single series called the group back to touring and promotion. The songs on the group’s third album bend genres in ways that the group had become famous for. The group always identified with hip-hop more than teen pop. But MADE was a mature effort by a group of Korean mid-twenty somethings, outgrowing the last notions of squeaky-clean teen pop. Songs like “We Like 2 Party,” “Bang Bang Bang,” “Sober,” and 2016’s “Fxxk It”dealt with mature themes of drinking, sex, and shedding innocence. Musically, the album flirts with pop, rock, trap, and acoustic styles. The first single, “Loser,” feels like a 2015 evolution of emo. It’s a self-loathing song for the often optimistic group. It mimics a schoolyard bully’s chant, though the speaker is singing it as self-deprecation. Fortunately, BigBang doesn’t stay in this theme for long, touching on emo before picking back up with upbeat songs. 


    Read the Korean lyrics on Genius.

    Read the English lyrics on Genius.

     

  • “Like Water” by Wendy, Tuesday, June 4, 2024

    On Christmas 2019, Shon Seung-wan (손승완), better known by her stage name Wendy, fell off the stage when rehearsing for a solo performance on SBS Gayo Daejeon. Faulty stage design and alleged lack of safety measures were blamed, causing the Red Velvet singer to fall over 8 feet, sustaining injuries on her right side–a pelvic fracture, a broken wrist, and a broken cheekbone.

    Not only did this fall cancel the upcoming event, but it left her in the hospital for two months. Fortunately, the accident didn’t end Wendy’s career but forced her to take a hiatus for most of 2020 from her role as singer and dancer in SM Entertainment’s one-time fifth-most steamed K-pop group on Spotify. 


    I WANT YOU TO LOVE ME. Wendy debuted with the group Red Velvet in 2014. The girl group is known for a dualistic sound signified by their name, Red implies the group’s frenetic energy they apply as dancers and singers to musically complex song structures. Velvet refers to the smooth sound of the group’s ballads. Much of Wendy’s solo work falls into the velvet side of the group. Coming from a wealthy family in Seoul, Seung-wan received a middle and high school education in the United States and Canada, where she adopted the name, Wendy Shon and became fluent in English. She played sports, learned several instruments, and participated in choir. After high school, she returned to Korea to try out for SM Entertainment. Although she was talented and came from a music-loving family, her parents didn’t want her to pursue music professionally at first. Wendy started releasing solo singles and collaborating with other artists in 2015. Most of the singles were soundtracks for dramas. In 2018, she sang an English duet with American singer-songwriter John Legend. Wendy released her first EP or “mini album” Like Water in April 2021. In the title track, Wendy sings in English “I just wanna thank you for believing in me.” In this line, she shows gratitude to her fans who remembered her as she was recovering from the frightening, potentially career-ending accident.


    I NEED YOU TO HOLD ME. Red Velvet had plans to tour their 2019 record, ‘The ReVe Festival’ in 2020 without Wendy. The tour started in Japan but was postponed due to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Following the tour postponement, the group decided to go on hiatus and would return with Wendy in January 2021 as a full-time member. She contributed vocals for drama soundtracks with the group when she could.  But before Red Velvet came back with their August 2021 EP Queendom, Wendy released her debut solo EP, Like Water.  The EP wasn’t a huge hit; an album of ballads usually isn’t a huge commercial success in Korea compared to an idol’s electropop. Still, the short record reintroduced Wendy and left listeners with a sentimental feeling for the singer who was back in K-pop. And pop music wasn’t the only venture she came back to pursue. She was a cast member of Saturday Night Live Korea in 2021 and hosted a radio show from 2021 to 2023. Last year, she was also cast as the wife in the musical Rebecca, a German music translated into Korean based on English novelist Daphne du Maurier’s novel of the same name. Today’s song is for Wendy’s fans. The fans sustained her “like water” during a career drought. What’s next for Wendy? A talent like hers certainly is bound to give the fans something incredible. 



  • Siren” by Taeyeon, Monday, June 3, 2024 (repost)

     Two summers ago, Taeyeon released her first single from the album she released on Valentine’s Day last year, INVU. The disco-infused lead single, “Weekend,” wasn’t completely indicative of the album’s style. With a variety of ballads, house, and dance songs, INVU is a solid third record from the now legendary former Girls’ Generation vocalist. Today’s song, “Siren,” is a power ballad located as track 6 of a 13-song album.  It’s a song about an unhealthy relationship that beckons the speaker to stay in it. Ultimately does she dive in or get out of the water?

     

    An ancient painting of sirens in 
    The Odyssey. Source.
    CRUEL FANTASY. Today’s song, “Siren,” uses the image of a mythical creature from ancient Greek and Roman legends. Creatures with beautiful songs that lure sailors to perilous shallow, rocky waters appear in Homer’s The Odyssey. In book 12, Circe advises Odysseus not to listen to their “honey-sweet tones” that “bewitch everybody who approaches them.” But the cunning Greek epic hero takes the warning as a challenge. He asks his crew to cover and plug their ears with wax and to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he won’t take the ship to land. From those lines in the epic poem and from the mythology itself, sirens seem to be a symbol of sexual pleasure that is the final step that takes a “reasonably good man” into sexual depravity. In antiquity, sirens were depicted as either bird-like or mermaid-like creatures. Some have said that the myth of the sirens was really the low visibility at sea and the yelps of sea-lions, and a bit of hallucination, seeing something on the rocks through the mists. 

    Starbucks logo depicts a double-tailed siren. 
    Image source.

    EVEN IF WE KISS EACH OTHER FOREVER. Siren myths appear in literature and culture throughout the ages. Starbucks’ logo is perhaps one of the most common examples in our everyday lives. Siren mythology appears in Anberlin’s “Take Me As You Found Me,” a song about a divorced couple who are still love each other. A siren (or mermaid) appears in Copeland’s video for “I Can Make You Feel Young Again,” dragging the fisherman to the bottom of the lake. But the word siren in English doesn’t usually bring the mythical creature to mind in everyday conversations. Instead, we think of the mournful, high-pitched sounds related to an emergency: a fire, a bank robbery, a tornado, missiles launched. Are the two words related? It seems that we started using siren to describe the sound of steamships as late as 1879. The usage of the word migrated to land and it now sounds like the intro to Anberlin’s “Hello Alone.” Plugging the etymology back into today’s song, Taeyeon describes a magnetism to an unhealthy relationship. He’s a siren beckoning her to the dangerous rocks. She hears the warning siren, and others can see that there’s danger. What happens? Is there an ambulance chase? Is it a fifty-car pileup that causes a collision in the other direction? Or does she sail away? 

    Read the Lyrics on Genius.

    Lyric video in Korean, Romanization, and English:

  • “The Tortured Poets Department” by Taylor Swift, Sunday, June 2, 2024

    Last year Taylor Swift was in the middle of a whirlwind romance with the frontman The 1975, Matty Healy, allegedly. This romance came after Swift broke up with actor Joe Alwyn after a six-year relationship. Swift and Healy’s relationship has never been confirmed by Swift or Healy, but the press surrounding the two and neither’s denial of the affair has cemented the relationship in pop culture canon. The spring fling was said to have lasted for a month, possibly a fortnight. All of this was happening in the middle of Swift’s Midnights Era—songs about life experiences that supposedly happened in the past. Some listeners have interpreted Midnights as a breakup album.


    LIKE A TATTOOED GOLDEN RETRIEVER.  Fans were eagerly awaiting for Taylor Swift to reward their Easter Egg hunt with the release of The Tortured Poets Department, the album that she announced when she won Album of the Year at the 2024 Grammy Awards. The Easter Eggs Swift gave fans and the press led listeners to believe that Swift was going to release a confessional album about the erosion of her longest documented and some would stay stablest relationship. There were details about Swift’s unhappiness in the relationship and a few against the character of Joe Alwyn. Swift’s latest offering was slated to be a tell-all slanderous memoir against the private English actor, starting with the name of the album, a play on a group chat Alwyn was in, called “The Tortured Man Club” with fellow English actors Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal. Instead, the title track and many of the songs on the album seem to deal with Swift’s complicated relationship with Matty Healy. The Swifty scholars on the Internet are mixed on this opinion, but a larger percentage believe that the title track is about Healy, which begs the question, why does he earn a title track when fans thought they would be getting a break up album about Joe Alwyn? 


    WHO ELSE DECODES YOU? As Taylor Swift is one of the biggest celebrities in 2024, there is simultaneously so much and so little known about her. Like an excellent writer, she only gives the details we need—facts to establish background—the things we know about almost every celebrity from their place of birth to the first song they sang on stage. But somewhere along the way, Swift became an expert of keeping personal details closely under wraps. She gives paperazzi a show, publicly spending time with men she apparently has dated and women whom she supports—this is not to discount Gaylor theories. Everything else she reportedly covers in NDAs—staff, friends, lovers, lovers’ family members. Also, Swift reportedly makes ex-boyfriends sign a statement that she is allowed to use details of their relationship in her songs so that she is not sued for libel later and that they do not reveal their side of the story. Interestingly, some sources claim that Matty Healy never signed an NDA. Still, details about Healy seem mostly positive on the album—a misunderstood artist who has alienated himself from Taylor’s fanbase and her famous friends, such as Ice Spice and Lucy Dacas. The details of the relationship disappear in a lavender haze, but could it be that Swift chose her friends and fans over her “tattooed golden retriever?” Although Swift has extricated herself from London and its love triangles, I think that more of this story will come out eventually. It’s far too interesting of a story to be footnotes in a mediocre anthology of poetry. 


    Read the lyrics on Genius.




  • "Video Game" by Sufjan Stevens, Saturday, June 1, 2024 + Pride Month Playlist

    It’s time for our annual Pride Month playlist. Headlining this year is Sufjan Stevens with his hipster hit “Video Game.” Last year, Stevens officially came out after years of speculation and artist support through songs from the 2017 film Call Me By Your Name and the single Love Yourself / With My Whole Heart. This year I’m including my usual mix of queer artists and allies. While the corporates may be scaling down their Pride sections this year, I say, now is the time that counts. So many human rights are on the verge of collapse. Today’s the day we say, “I don’t wanna play your video game!”


    Check out Pride ‘24 on Spotify.