hit or miss for me musically, has songs I do quite like but also loads that are just… too much, doesn’t feel like music it just feels like sound. I also am against idol culture and the hyperproduction of the band and the brand- that’s not part of the music per se, but it does color it and it makes me uncomfortable. My understanding is that Stray Kids are actually one of the better kpop groups in that regard, insofar as the members have more control, but that’s relative. I dunno, that part is icky to me and it was visible. As far as just the music, yeah there were definitely plenty of bits that I liked (part of that is just the sheer quantity of stuff that’s being pumped out, plus again part of the appeal of this type of thing is that they do enough of all the different types of popular to appeal to everyone), and also plenty of bits I just didn’t care for at all. The album IN LIFE was pretty solid I think, though. Dunno how my feelings on them will change with time, I’m curious to find out
RELISTEN1: So, the first thing coming out of this relisten is maybe the least exciting, but it might also be the biggest as far as impact on my system and how I listen to things in the future. Or at least, it paves the way for some kind of change to potentially happen somewhere down the line. That is, I’ve decided to count all the mini albums as albums. It seems to me that the “mini albums”, 7-8 track EPs typically around 22 minutes, are actually a rather common thing in K-Pop, they’re kinda a standard. Honestly, K-Pop is just such a pain all around. They do these mini albums, they do compilation stuff with already released songs all the time, they do tons of rereleases of old songs in different languages and include them in otherwise new records. They’re hard to keep track of. They’re organized around corporate industry, consumer hype, and actively participatory fandoms– they’re not particularly interested in being organized strictly around the music, and I so much would rather they were. I’m still gonna listen to more of them, both because I’m gonna be going to Korea for a couple months and because they’re hugely culturally relevant to the pop music scene (and frankly, to the global world and culture), it’s just more work for me to sift through stuff. More decisions for me to make on how to fit them into my structure in a way that’s most useful to me. Tough.
None of that is about the music yet, though. For K-Pop I admit, there’s a lot that goes into it that kinda turns me off that’s not actually about the music itself, so I’ll go over that. We’ve got the literal music side of things, and everything else. I’ll start with the everything else, which, again, is mostly stuff I take issue with.
I can acknowledge that “the album” is an arbitrary unit, but I still think it’s useful and more than that, I like it. It bums me out a little to have that 30-40ish minute standard dropped down to 20 minutes, and it’s exhausting to have the 20 minute chunks pumped out constantly. I don’t like how difficult it is to sift through the discography and listen to each song once. That’s something I want from everyone, from the music industry as a whole, actually. Every streaming service should have a way to filter albums, taking out identical reuploads, and/or remixes, and/or covers, and/or remasters, and/or otherwise alternate versions of otherwise same songs. Every streaming service should have playlist or folder or whatever that has every song by an artist released outside of an album. And yeah, Stray Kids is particularly bad at this. So many reuploads, compilation albums with three new songs that are found nowhere else, 20 minute eps where 8 of the minutes are Japanese or English versions of previously released songs. It makes consuming their content difficult, I have to put in so much more of my own legwork, it’s a huge hassle. The parasocial aspect of things is still not my jam. I still don’t like it, I think it’s distracting and more than that I don’t enjoy it, it’s not my style. It makes it hard to take the art at face value because it’s impossible to escape the deepest underlying theme that something is being sold. This is content before it is art, it’s content before it is meaning, that’s undeniable.
Then there’s the literal music. There are parts I like. On average, I like probably about two songs per release, plus two or three across the whole discography that I really like. The rest of it, I don’t love. I don’t know if I’d describe it the same way I did two years ago. I complained that at times it felt less like music and more like just sound. I think I’ve come a way since then, that’s no longer accurate. I can hear the music, I can hear the ideas better now. I think what I was calling “just sound” was in reality the part of Stray Kids’ DNA that holds their hip-hop influence. It’s definitely music, but I still don’t think I like it all that much. It’s these hip-hop and electronic elements that just feel to me like noise, that do not make for pleasant listening. It’s almost more frustrating with Stray Kids, for me, because they have songs with lots of harmonic information that are engaging and enjoyable for me, and then they have songs that feel boring and lifeless, hip-hop inspired raps over basic beats. I can recognize that that’s a personal preference, but it’s a strong one. Music is harmony. Music is also rhythm, but music is also harmony, there’s so much awesome stuff to do with harmony and melody and it rubs me the wrong way to go without, to reduce it away so drastically.
I do think, at this point, it’s probably fair to say that there being songs I legitimately quite like is likely more a function of sheer output quantity more than anything else. Which is a bummer, but sometimes that’s how it goes. C’est la vie. I’m gonna scooch it down to a low B
tunafruitsandwitch 