SuperM – Jopping
Looking forward to their follow-up single, Pazzing…
[Video]
[5.00]
Alex Clifton: I am never jumping nor popping, so I cannot jop to save my life, but SuperM makes this feel plausible. It’s really neat to see a supergroup of this calibre but the silliness of the title combined with the constant stylistic shifts does the song a disservice; it’s close to being more of a bop but ends up having a few great moments in between all the filler. Taemin sounds great, though!
[5]
Katie Gill: As one of a handful of people who really liked “Kill This Love,” it should come as no surprise that I adore the loud, obnoxious, brass band-esque nature of the chorus. A bit less fond of the more minimalist stylings of the verses and dance break, but there is no way SuperM would have enough stamina or chutzpah to support an entire song with the obnoxious bombast of that chorus. Also, I’m sure that other blurbs will say this so there’s no need to belabor the point, but “jopping” is a fucking stupid word to build a song around.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: If it were in any way silly, it’d make sense to my ears. There’s this plasticky, Imagine Dragons-y tone to the shouted bits and a movie-trailer SFX theme running under it all that effects an unappealing self-seriousness. For a song that’s presumably about having a good time at the club, it’s awfully stressed out.
[3]
Ryo Miyauchi: “Jopping” is the most expensive addition to the NCT universe. Everyone involved is very much in on the “Avengers of K-pop” tagline with that slightly tongue-in-cheek intro led by the THX brass. But the flexing rhymes are as Hip Hop 101 as “Regular,” and the beat is as bouncy and tactile as “Simon Says.” An audacious move, though, is how NCT’s seniors stand in as decoration, their rising vocals applied as something resembling epic string flourishes to convey grandeur. It’s held up by some bloat, both the production and this whole supergroup deal, for a simple dance-pop song centered on an endearingly dumb portmanteau. Yet it’s not surprising to see the same company that brought a single called “Wakey Wakey” this year with equal amounts of style and cheese to go this far to give some feeling of a blockbuster event.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: As if the Backstreet Boys did a Warcraft III tie-in single in the ’90s, except sultry. Whose idea was this shit?
[7]
Michael Hong: If you’re going to promote your new supergroup as the “Avengers of K-pop,” maybe go for something a little more interesting than an NCT B-side coated in a futuristic gloss.
[4]
Iain Mew: The combination of the ill-fitting ridiculousness of the title phrase and the total insistence on not acknowledging that at any point makes the song. An assortment of fairly rote swagger modes end up taking on an air of surreal successful tightrope walk. We we we joppington.
[7]
Alfred Soto: An excruciating listen. Every time this act turns its fleeting attention to one element, the arrangement distorts again: the overcaffeinated as the protean.
[4]
My standard of what deserves a heaping of “yikes” or “um, no…” has evolved over the past year with meme culture, and somehow, the amalgamation of “jumping” and “popping” into “jumping” passes that test. But what bothers me even more about SuperM’s lead single is that the song itself fails to “jop”: the Korean supergroup feels like their stepping on the brakes of Charli XCX’s “Vroom Vroom” while putting decals of Beyoncé’s “Ring the Alarm” on the car. The result? A chorus that replaces the zany flair of ITZY’s “Icy” with gratuitous bass bombast, and an out-of-left-field bridge that Big Time Rush could’ve pulled off.