2018 in retrospect: k-pop (overview)

Welcome to the first part of my yearly Retrospective series of posts! If this is your first time here, a word of explanation is probably needed — I’ve been doing these posts since 2014 and every year, the only common thing between them has been my AMV list (which will be coming up here in the next few days). In past iterations I’ve also posted about the music, anime, and manga I consumed that year, but I’ve never had a consistent set of post topics on a year-to-year basis.

However last year, I posted a couple lists detailing some of my favorite stuff from the K-pop scene in 2017, and I felt really good about that so I decided to do that again this time around. There are only going to be two topical features this year — one regarding K-pop and the other AMVs — and while I’m scared of setting a precedent for the K-pop side of things (keep reading), it is a thing I really enjoy so I figured I’d give it a go again this time around. Much like last year, I’ll be listing my favorite K-pop songs and my favorite K-pop albums from 2018 in a ranked order, over the next three posts. In this post I’ll also be going over some scattered thoughts I’ve had regarding K-pop over the last 12 months, as well as talking about a few albums/EPs that are worth mentioning, but couldn’t be on my final list for various reasons.

After last year’s lists, I had an idea that I’d be doing the K-pop thing again for this year’s Retrospective posts, so I got started fairly early on tracking 2018’s K-pop releases. I determined to listen to each and every thing I could find on Spotify from this list of releases on Wikipedia, and although I didn’t quite make it through everything, I’d say I covered about 60-75% of the stuff on there (I listened through a total of 176 K-pop albums/EPs from this year). I’ll explain why I couldn’t do it all below, but suffice it to say that I got a very good, wide-ranging view of the K-pop scene in 2018, and I feel pretty confident that while my lists will certainly not be authoritative, they’re about as good and thorough as I could have hoped for. For K-pop neophytes, you can have some level of confidence that the music I’ll be listing in the following posts is quality stuff, in case you want to take a deeper dive into the genre.

I’ll mention it here as well as in my post regarding the best K-pop albums, but I should kind of lay out the criteria I used to determine what was eligible for my album list, because it feeds into why some of the things below were not considered for my final list. In no particular order:

• In order to be considered for my list, a release from a K-pop artist had to have at least five non-intro/outro style songs, or instrumental versions of other songs — anything with four or less full-length songs was not included for consideration on the final list.

• Releases from Korean artists which had the majority of songs sung in a language other than Korean were not considered (sorry, Taemin, although if it makes anyone feel better that album probably wouldn’t have made it onto my list anyway).

• Most non-K-pop fans probably have a pretty narrow definition of what they’d consider K-pop — dancey or ballad-y pop music sung by groups of youngish Korean guys or girls with crazy hair colors and a lot of makeup. This is a fair definition given the way K-pop has been marketed to Western audiences, but for my lists I have expanded consideration to plenty of artists that do not fit the typical “idol” stereotypes — Korean artists that make mainly hip hop, R&B, jazz-pop, acoustic pop, and some indie pop-type music were open to consideration as well, unless I arbitrarily decided they weren’t. Purely instrumental music made by Korean artists was not considered.

• Repackages or albums with a significant percentage of pre-2018 material being re-released/remixed were not up for consideration.

Got all that? Good! One final note, also, for anyone reading who might be, like, really into K-pop — although I’d label myself more than a casual fan, my interest in the genre typically stops at the music. That said, I’m married to a woman who, God bless her, is obsessed with K-pop to a much more detailed level than I am, so I get a fair taste of some of the things that happen in K-pop culture (and especially anything BTS-related — my wife is Army, for those at home keeping score). Beyond this osmotic transfer of information, though, I don’t go out of my way to immerse myself in the culture, excepting occasional perusal of /r/kpop. This may or may not be relevant to anything I’m about to post, but it never hurts to set expectations!

With that done, let’s start by getting some of the bad stuff out of the way first.

DISAPPOINTMENTS
There were quite a few things this year that just didn’t live up to my expectations, or were just disappointing in general. Let’s have a look at some of them.

• “Fake Love” is so completely unrepresentative of what BTS are capable of. I don’t know if any other comeback was quite as much a letdown to me as this one was. To my Army readers, put down your pitchforks, as BTS did plenty right this year as we’ll see in a bit. But after Love Yourself 承 ‘Her’ was released last year, which was basically a solid album’s worth of top-tier tracks, “Fake Love” felt like the most generic, boring thing the group had ever released. (It’s probably worth mentioning that I’ve kind of come around to this song since then, though not completely.) It’s ok, though — I still love these guys, and you’ll be hearing about them plenty over the next three days.

• No full-length or EPs from Zico. If I had to re-consider my rankings for the albums I posted about last year, Zico’s Television would almost certainly move up a few slots, as he’s become one of my absolute favorite artists in the K-pop world. So it was sad not to see anything from him other than “SoulMate” (but don’t get me wrong — this is an excellent song and we’ll be returning to it later). Hopefully this means that his next EP/album, whenever it’s released, will just be that much better.

• Similar sentiments for Neon Bunny, and the lack of anything from her this year, besides “Tell Me”. Right at the end of 2017 she released “Now”, which was one of my favorite K-pop songs from last year, and I was really hoping we’d have at least an EP on our hands by this point. Ah well. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

• On the more drama-heavy side of K-pop, we witnessed the ousting of HyunA and E’Dawn from their label, apparently for revealing their dating relationship to the media without the label’s approval…or something. Like I said above, I don’t really follow this stuff too closely, but incidents like this shed a poor light on the entire K-pop industry, and reveal just how weird and morally ambiguous these labels can be. More immediately, this episode marked the end of Triple H, and although they had a somewhat weak showing this year with Retro Futurism, I always had a soft spot for them and their funky throwback sound, which is unlike most other stuff being floated around the K-pop world currently.

• As long as we’re talking about drama, how about that whole Wanna One controversy? This is something that I would normally not even deign to talk about because it’s so stupid, but then the fandom had to go and insist on getting the footage forensically analyzed, to be fed the (probable) lie that the swearing they supposedly heard on camera was actually machine noises in the background. Thank God! Image saved! People like this weird me out, and while this isn’t a phenomenon restricted to K-pop fans (lest we forget that creepy PowerPoint analysis some insane fan did on the relationship between Jack Antonoff and Lorde), sasaengs tend take these situations to uncomfortable levels. Chill out, fangirls, holy crap.

• Mamamoo didn’t come through. Well, they almost didn’t come through — the last EP they released this year, BLUE;S, was halfway decent, but the other two (Yellow Flower and Red Moon) felt incredibly phoned-in and trite, which stings all the more given that they’re one of the few girl groups that I’ve basically always liked up to this point. It’s not that either of these EPs was especially bad, either, but Mamamoo have always kind of pushed the boundaries just enough to set them apart, with slightly jazzier rhythms and arrangements that would always break up the monotony of any K-pop playlist they happened to be on. In 2018, they felt like just another girl group, which is a place I hoped they’d never go.

• In a similar vein, I was really underwhelmed by the majority of idol groups this year — as you’ll see when we get into my favorite albums/EPs, most of them are by individuals, not groups. Every idol group is just kinda starting to blend into the same sound and it’s getting harder for me to differentiate between them. Fortunately, on an individual level, there’s still room for creative expression that otherwise seems to be suppressed in a group context.

• KARD are doing the whole tropical house thing again. Right after they had done something slightly daring and innovative and good with last year’s You & Me, they’ve fallen back on probably the most tired sound in all of K-pop. I was rooting for these guys but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve completely faded into obscurity within the next couple years, if not sooner.

GENERAL THOUGHTS

• I mentioned above that I’m worried about setting a precedent for these K-pop posts. The reason for this is twofold — for one, it’s a lot of fricking work. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s something I have to stay on top of throughout the year because trying to cover an entire year’s worth of music is impossible to do otherwise. The bigger issue though is that I am prone to massive burnout, which I experienced at multiple points throughout the year as I listened through K-pop releases. While I’m excited to share my thoughts with you, I can’t say preparing these lists was always a pleasant experience, and in some ways it may have lowered my opinion of the genre more than I’d have liked.The fact here is that so much of this stuff just begins to sound the same. Even groups I normally like start to blur into a soupy mess of the same voices, the same posturing, the same melodies and drops and breakdowns. I always knew that K-pop was manufactured on a microscopic level, but I feel like I can predict this stuff with the accuracy of lab machinery at this point. It takes a toll, man.

• As an illustration of this, every album I listened to I rated how much I liked it on a scale of 1-10. The average for all 176 albums/EPs was 5.8/10. So…yeah.

• Although this may make more sense to put in the “Disappointments” section above, the truth is I had no expectations going in so I wasn’t really disappointed, but I figure here’s a good place to share my least favorite K-pop album of 2018, and this distinct honor goes to F;UZZLE by MYTEEN, a collection of songs that is every bit as bad as the album title and group name would suggest. To drive this home: this album has a song called “BBQ (At The Barbecue)” with actual English lyrics that read, “Be my Barbie / Be my be my Barbie / Be my Barbie at the barbecue”. I don’t typically cringe at most bad K-pop lyrics, but this one moved my muscles. Hilariously bad.

• Shoutout to JBJ, a group that was formed in October 2017 and then disbanded in April 2018, after releasing a full-length and EP that, taken together, were actually not that bad. Neither made it onto my final list, but I feel like these guys didn’t really get a good chance to develop and they made music that was significantly better than a lot of other guy groups that have been around for a lot longer. Those curious shouldn’t expect too much, but JBJ was one of the few groups that I feel was an unfair casualty of the industry’s merciless profit-driven tendencies.

• I’m kinda stuck between a couple different choices for my least favorite album art of the year — it goes to either Suzy’s goofy, awkward pose/facial expression on her (unfortunately titled) album Faces of Love, OR it could be Nam Woo-hyun’s “Now where did I leave my keys?” look on Second Write. Good job guys.

NON-ELIGIBLE BUT STILL AWESOME
Here are some albums (and a song) that I have a bit to say about, but based on the criteria I laid out above, weren’t eligible for my lists for one reason or another (in other words — these aren’t “honorable mentions” that were good but not quite good enough for my lists — these are things that are excellent but I couldn’t include). Take time out of your day to check them out!

Shaun – Take
Take, at only four songs, is a short and sweet EP of hypermodern EDM that shines like the Sun — Shaun’s voice is absolutely heavenly and even though musically, these songs don’t stray too far from the kind of stuff you’re likely to hear on Top 40 radio, it outputs something approaching human sincerity, which is much more than I can say for 99% of the music it’s imitating. Definitely worth a look, and this is an artist I’m going to be watching with interest in 2019.

BTS – Love Yourself 結 ‘Answer’
I actually don’t have too much to say about this one because the majority of it is stuff from either last year, from the other album they released this year, or remixes of existing material. The thing is — it’s pretty darn good, and I would even say that if you’re still, somehow, oblivious to these guys, is a great entry point as it collects pretty much everything relevant from them in the last two years and arranges it in a way that has thematic significance. It also has the longer, better version of “Singularity” (see below) and several new tracks, although most of them are not too outstanding in my own opinion. But, yeah — this is absolutely worth listening to, and if they had left out the old stuff, almost definitely would have made it onto my final list.

LOONA yyxy – beauty&thebeat
LOONA’s third and final subunit finally debuted this year with beauty&thebeat, a lightning-quick four-song (+intro) EP that falls neatly into the sonics established by LOONA 1/3 and Odd Eye Circle last year. The obvious highlight here is “love4eva”, a song we’ll be returning to in the upcoming song list, but the whole EP is enjoyable from beginning to end and serves as a nice introduction to the whole LOONA concept. You really can’t go wrong with anything LOONA-related, and this EP served as a nice stopgap to sate everyone’s craving for the full LOONA debut.

Ashmute – 01
I really, really wish Ashmute had included one more non-instrumental track on this EP, because it absolutely would have been on my final list, but alas, it’s relegated to here; luckily I still get to talk about it. 01 operates in a realm of soft lighting and translucent shadows — it’s a quiet album, but it’s buoyed by singer Rang’s ethereal vocals. Pulling influences from dream pop and art pop, it flits between the real world and dreamland, simultaneously relaxing to listen to and full of tension. Ashmute are a group that few people seem to really know about, but that’s not a status they deserve — give this unknown gem a listen and keep it in your back pocket for those overcast days.

BTS – “Serendipity (Full Length Edition)”
“Serendipity” was originally released as the first track on Love Yourself 承 ‘Her’ last year, however that was a shortened version of what they released this year, so I can’t in good conscience put this one on my 2018 list, which kills me because this is absolutely one of the best things attached to the BTS name and it would be sitting somewhere in my Top 3 K-pop songs of the year, most likely.

As a group, BTS have been releasing these solo performances from each of their members at a slow drip, and with “Serendipity” Jimin’s the one in the spotlight, delivering one of the most wistful and gorgeously shimmery vocal performances in all of K-pop. The song sounds like the kind of thing the most hopelessly lovelorn 20something would write, with poetic melodrama wafting from lyrics like:

Ever since the universe was first formed
Everything has been planned
Just let me love you

It’s a beautiful kind of melodrama, though, and when you hear stuff like this it’s really no surprise as to why BTS are at the peak of the world right now. “Serendipity” may not have the showy, high-def ultramaximalism that defines the group’s appeal to outsiders, but like most things, its defter touch leaves the kind of impression that’s impossible to shake, even in K-pop’s swiftly moving current.