Member Since: 3/2/2014
Posts: 5,243
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Girls’ Generation: “I Got a Boy”
Founded in 2007 by SM Entertainment, the nine members of Girls’ Generation comprise the most iconic pop group in Asia. Though having found their popularity through bubblegum classics “Gee” and “Genie”, last year’s #1 “I Got a Boy” demonstrates their aptitude in less comfortable territory. On or off the charts, contemporary pop doesn’t get much weirder: The song is split between at least five musically distinct movements, an equal number of staggering, 40-BPM tempo jumps, a spectrum of genres covering snap music to Italo disco, multiple bars of abrupt silence, and a theatrical narrative with nine different characters. It’s like an entire musical, or rock opera, scrunched into an especially pliable pop tune.
Sometimes the tempo changes announce themselves—“Don’t stop! Let’s bring it back to 140!”—but mostly they’re meant to blindside. It’s been speculated that all this jarring tempo play references Korean club culture, where impatient DJs might switch songs after barely a chorus. But in any context, “I Got a Boy” takes chart pop’s increasing ADD in a bold new direction, and is perhaps the most structurally variable mega-hit since “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Considering the song topped all charts in Korea—with a video that has tallied more than 100 million views—Girls’ Generation prove the adventurousness of K-pop’s listenership, as well as the storytelling potential available to Asia’s pop groups.
Girls’ Generation: “Gee”
Modern Korean music’s comfort zone lies in unadulterated bubblegum pop, and this list would be incomplete without acknowledging its magnum opus. “Gee” is K-pop at its most mathematically reduced, radically pure essence—a pop song so formally irrefutable that, for one golden year, it overcame half a millennium of historical animosity to broker pop cultural peace between Korea and Japan. Domestically, it is the most popular South Korean song of its decade. And most international K-pop fans, consciously or not, owe their obsession to the butterfly effect “Gee” set into motion upon its 2009 release.
The idea of writing an original thought about “Gee” is, for the K-pop connoisseur, like trying to find a fresh insight in Abbey Road or The Great Gatsby. It’s hardly necessary; a tale of first love that transcends the language barrier, “Gee” speaks for itself. It was a flash of brilliance so bright that the production duo behind it could only sputter and fail from there. In a way, that feels appropriate: “Gee” is the greatest feat Korea will ever accomplish in traditional songcraft. From here, K-pop’s true future lies in the experimental, the experiential, and the unexplored.
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Global Generation ha acclaim
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He should rename the list 'My favorite Kpop songs" because that's basically what this list is.
Mess. I love HFB but literally every TVXQ title track is more deserving of a place on this list than this. Especially Mirotic.