The Singles Jukebox

After making a withdrawal from the “ATM,” we look into some diamonds…

[Video]
[4.86]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: “VVS” just capped off a 7-week reign at #1, and it’s similar to other popular non-idol rap songs from the past couple years in that it both comes from Show Me the Money and is a satisfying posse cut. Both elements feel crucial to why these songs are successful; regarding the latter, many of these rappers’ solo work suffers from sounding too much like familiar Western rap ideas, but hearing these artists alongside others allows for sustained energy. There’s a delight in hearing the anodyne guitar strums be nothing more than a backdrop for everyone’s voices (and the song feels more lively than the first time I remember hearing rock-guitar posturing in a contemporary-sounding non-idol Korean rap song). Miranni’s melodic vocalizing works nicely alongside JUSTHIS’s rapping, which resembles a slightly less garbled version of NO:EL. MUSHVENOM’s burly, theatrical verse is reminiscent of Han Yo Han’s on “Dding,” and it caps off a song that almost devolves into AutoTuned mush. It’s long, but there’s a sort of love for these posse cuts in Korea as a way to just showcase everyone at their best; I’m just thankful the hook is memorable. Besides, there’s been much, much longer.
[6]

Thomas Inskeep: A big-ass hip hop posse cut with a bunch of rappers who actually sound distinctively different from each other, thank goodness. (American rappers, are you paying attention?) The most exciting of these is MUSHVENOM (who takes the final verse), because he sounds the most urgent – he’s not here to fuck around. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: Distinctive rappers, no question, but the tuffness feels more affected than real. No reason for this brostep thing to stretch beyond five minutes either.
[4]

Samson Savill de Jong: Because I don’t speak Korean, all this sounds like to me is a caricature of American hip-hop and all of its worst instincts: the Auto-Tune, the “scoot scoot” ad libs, the repetitious chorus. The sense of genericness isn’t helped by the lines that are in English being extraordinary cookie-cutter. Generic songs can be saved by fun lyricism, and while skimming through the translated lyrics might show me that there’s not a lot of depth topic wise, it doesn’t really convey if they’re said in a fun or clever way. The rapping sounds technically fine, they all have a sense of flow, but that’s not enough to carry a posse cut, especially when it’s 5 and a half minutes long. This might be a great song to someone who understands the words, but everything else is pretty bad.
[2]

Tobi Tella: An exercise in posse cut patience, it teases becoming interesting with every personal reference to the come-up or invoking of Korean culture as a whole. Unfortunately, there’s a lot to wade through to get there and while there’s still a slight novelty to a guitar-influenced beat, it can’t stop these 5 minutes from eventually becoming a slog.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: This song made me realize we’re probably really close to the year music heads will start reassessing brostep. Not sure whether that’s points off or points extra.
[5]

John S. Quinn-Puerta: Hip-hop pop punk hasn’t sounded this good to me in a while. Sometimes the difference between the constant strumming of the guitar and the drum machines becomes a little too noticeable, but this still gives me a feeling I haven’t had since the first time I heard Mike Shinoda in a Linkin Park song. That’s probably a good thing, even if this isn’t something I seek out regularly.
[6]