Music! Girls' Generation Edition

This post.....has been a long time coming, I suspect.  I've dabbled here and there in K-Pop posts, talked about people in particular like BoA, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of people out there are conditioned, at this point, to equate K-Pop with Girls' Generation.  Mostly because of the staggering success(?) of "Gee", which you'll find that people who don't even really know much about the genre at all, have heard the song.  They have presence in the genre, is basically what I'm getting at, and to say that they will come up in a conversation -about- K-Pop is something of an understatement I think.  Aside from that, being that I've listened to a lot of Girls' Generation in the past week, so it seemed like a pretty good fit, being that I'm still trying to sort of pin things down with regards to how I feel about Retro City Rampage and how I can put those feelings into words.  The hard part, as it seems to be with all of my 'Music!' posts is just condensing things down into just three different songs since I generally have twice that at base, but I like the three-song format, so I'll stick with it.

The first song introduces a sort of trend that follows in the rest of the songs I'll feature, or at least the videos for them, in that I'm just going with the 'dance only' versions of the videos.  I've found that sometimes, not all of the time, but sometimes the 'normal' version of a video for a song ends up loaded with....let's say unnecessary elements and when you just want the song and the framing of the song itself, and not the minute and a half of 'build' that 'sets a scene' and such, these dance only versions are very handy.  In the case of the first song here, I watched the original video and it's....just awful.  The parts they splice in that aren't just the basic dance parts (generally there's two costumes for each half of the song with a little mixing in between) with separate costumes are gaudy-looking and badly implemented and just make it kind of hard to watch.  But with this version of the song, it's really quite pleasant to watch and the song itself is pretty enjoyable as well.  So, with that introduction, here's the first song of the Girls' Generation post - "Hoot".

I think, moreso than any other video, I really like the overall aesthetic and theme of this one the best, really.  I'm not sure why I really like the whole '80s spy movie feel that the video has (which is expanded on in a...not so great way in the actual video), but it just works, and I think that's why this is a song that I keep coming back to.  Gonna be honest and say that the outfits make that easy to do as well.  Like with the feel of the video itself, I don't know why I like the outfits in particular, perhaps because they, well, fit the whole thing well, or perhaps because they're simple, yet well accessorized, but they're just really outstanding.  Well worth the loss of basically all my masculinity in saying that, clearly, which is saying....well, something I suppose.  Really, as a general rule, whoever picks out the outfits for the Girls' Generation videos does a pretty bang-up job 90% of the time, but they knocked it out of the park with this one.

Next up is another video where they did a pretty stellar job with the wardrobe despite the outfits being more or less pretty simple in concept.  The oddity about this song, however, is that it's actually a Japanese version of the song, as it was the first one I heard of it and by the time I heard the original Korean version, I was too attached to the Japanese one to move along.  After consulting several music experts (Read:  Not experts at all), we have deduced that, despite the song -being- Japanese, it's still a K-Pop song by virtue of the group being identified as a Korean group.  Despite....at least two of the girls being American-born, actually.  That brings us into a whole other discussion, however, so I'm going to just move along.  Because if I start wasting time trying to dissect the semantics surrounding a Japanese version of a Korean song whose band members aren't actually all Korean, it's going to get really weird and really confusing really quickly.  So, to move on, here's "Mr. Taxi".

I should say that, despite my warning, that's not labeled as the dance only version of the song, but after watching the dance only version, it's...pretty much identical.  This one has better quality, being directly from the source and all, so I'm running with that for the sake of having decent videos all throughout this.  Provided you're cool with Japanese versions of Kor-I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm not going to get into that here.  It's just going to be something I think about for....uh....the rest of the night, likely.  And it's going to bug me a whole lot, but that's really not the point of contention here.  I'm not sure if it's something that I need, or necessarily want, to say, but for the first few times I watched the video, I couldn't help but start giggling at the intro of the chorus where they do the little 'turning the wheel' move.  I don't know what's worse - that I have watched the video a -lot- of times by this point, or that I -still- laugh at that, since I'm not quite sure what it says about me.  Or....what any of this says about me.  Probably not good things.

The last video, since I inadvertently became a fashion critic because who am I even kidding anymore, is a rare miss in the outfit category.  Rather, the outfits themselves are pretty fine, it's just, uh....one accessory in particular that is a little strange to say the least.  However, this is one of the videos where I actually have to pick between two different dance versions, and to hammer in the fashion point, I'm going with the latter.  Or, if you go by numbering or whatever, the former, but semantics.  Again.  Don't need that right now.  I do want to offer the other version, however, so I will do that by linking it here, and if you like the song, I'd recommend checking that out to differentiate to the other outfits which are much nicer more or less.  Not a whole lot else to do with this one besides get it out there.  So the last song featured in this grouping of Girls' Generation songs is "Paparazzi".

So, yes.  Those gloves are.....well, they are something, I suppose.  What that something is, I'm kind of at a loss for, but it is certainly -something-.  Delving into the comments (which is always a bad idea, never do it, I do it because I hate myself or something) suggests that they wore the gloves to draw attention to their hands to show off all the hand movements the dance bits actually entail which...makes sense, but there are ways that could've done it a little better.  If that's the real reason of course, as another theory just says it's a shout out to actresses of the past who wore gloves like that, though not expressly as pink and unfitting.  Whatever the reason, it really does just seem a little excessive, for a lack of a better way to explain it.  Without being exceptionally rude, at least and I don't want to be rude.  Still, of the three songs I featured tonight, this one -might- be my favorite - it's a hard call between this and Hoot, and I think it more depends on my mood, but it is a pretty good song regardless.  I'm a sucker for the bit at the end when one of the girls says something and rolls her "R" with it and I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that it's a little different to hear and I cannot roll Rs.  So it's nice to hear every now and then, I guess.

I really didn't anticipate this write-up to actually make me feel this, uh...not embarrassed, not shamed.....self-conscious? about my music choices and such, which I suppose is saying something since I went into this going "Hey, Girls' Generation, gonna talk about that".  Still, at the end of the day, it's just music and you either like it or you don't - the reason behind whichever doesn't matter so much to anything.  Still, I feel like I have to work up a little masculinity again after this one, so if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go ahead and binge on some Burn Notice and such.  Possibly look for, uh....sports to watch.  Maybe.  I'm not sure if that counts as helping anymore after all the jokes about them and such.  Maybe I'll just default to throwing Sleeping Dogs in again and kicking the shit out of dudes.  Yeah.  Yeah, that sounds like a plan.