The Singles Jukebox

The only Korean girl group to provide tractor advice…

[Video][Website]
[6.00]

Jonathan Bradley: SNSD is also called Girls Generation for complicated reasons of translation, and that may be because the group is approximately equal in size to a Mormon family reunion. That large membership, along with my very limited understanding of Japanese, severely hinders my ability to distinguish the personality of any of the members — if indeed any of them possess any at all. As such, I’d hoped they might make up for it by exerting overwhelming force. Even augmented by tricksy vocal gapping, however, the slick dance beat hardly provides the grounds for the necessary display of strength.
[4]

Ian Mathers: The various vocalists do a perfectly fine job and the production is great Stormtrooper pop, though it’s compressed to hell; it hurt my ears, which I guess kind of works for production that sounds like boots stomping. Also, I think this is the song that finally made my mind up: I find it annoying when foreign language songs lace their verses and choruses with English words and phrases. I’m not sure why I do, except that I find it kind of distracting. So: A decent song, hampered by some poor choices.
[5]

Brad Shoup: All these bad girls, all these smokescreens. For miss A, a bad girl is a part to play on the dancefloor. I kind of assumed that’s what Taio and company were driving at, too. And here’s SNSD, threatening the bad-girl reveal the length of the song, making it a more serious act. But still, it is an act: “tell me what you wanna do,” they implore. Not very transgressive, that. But there’s melancholy in this one. Where a Guetta would have brought the synths to the fore, it’s all about the voices here: monotone for the verses, stirring as they promise the reveal. There’s a structural peculiarity, too: the group’s sizable membership means a constant rotation of line readings, which is a little jarring. One could read this as an insane clubgoer’s inner monologue; but then again, you could say that about a lot of the tunes we cover.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: I realize that concepts like badness and girlhood — not to even mention the highly fraught intersection of the two — are extremely culturally mediated, so that I’m as likely to catch the signifiers as I am to wake up speaking Japanese tomorrow. Still, I could catch no bad-girlness from the music, and only the vaguest nods towards it in the video. And I really wanted to.
[5]

Frank Kogan: A slight song, just inhalations and exhalations of beauty, gently gorgeous rather than emphatic, and might even be considered filler, but I love it even more than official greatest-song-ever-made “Gee.” Online translations, if they can be trusted, have the group collectively calling themselves a “perfect” bad girl, which is a juxtaposition of concepts — perfection and badness — I’ve never quite seen over here in America. There’s an edge to the words that I’m not perceiving in the sound, SNSD promising to enslave me in their allure: “Normally you would hate it, this rule of mine. It’s not hard. Just be obedient.” But what I’m hearing is simply the young women finishing each other’s thoughts, soft breath following upon soft breath.
[9]

Katherine St Asaph: Bad girls who know dozens of ways to burnish their voices and make a slight track sweet.
[7]