My First Love Story

BTS - “N.O” (O!RUL8,2?, 2013)

In 1994, two years before Sechs Kies debuted with “Song of School Life”, Seo Taiji & Boys released the song “교실 이데아” (“Classroom Idea”), a heavy metal-style song complete with a death grunt guest vocal. The morality police responded by accusing the group and Seo Taiji of leaving hidden Satanic messages in their music. It’s possible this would have happened regardless of what the song was about, but it probably didn’t help that the song’s lyrics that were heavily critical of the country’s school system and expressed a need for reform.

The South Korean school system is as famous for its role in the country’s successful economic turnaround and high-achieving test results as it is for its rigorous schedule and high-pressure, competitive atmosphere. BTS’s median age at debut was 19 (20 in Korean age), meaning half of the members were either just done with school or still in it. As a group whose lyrics draw on their lives, it’s natural that school comes up in a lot of their songs.

Most songs about school from a student’s perspective stick to describing the mechanical aspect of long days and the stifling lack of freedom. “학교의눈물” (School of Tears), a predebut track recorded by Jin, Rap Monster and Suga over the beat of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools”, goes even further. It paints a grim picture of a system that perpetuates violence against students and in turn encourages them to be violent to each other: “This is a ring called a classroom / This is a stadium with no referee, only an audience / You know there will never be a victor, everyone will lose / There will be no victor, everyone will lose.”

“N.O” is the follow-up single to “No More Dream”. It zooms in on the “school wrong, society wrong” idea of “School of Tears”, showing how the pressures of the school system are also pressures from society. “I want a big house, big cars, and big rings, but in truth, I don’t have any big dreams,” Suga says at the beginning of “No More Dream”. Rap Monster’s opening line in “N.O” responds, “A good house, a good car / Will these things bring happiness?”

While “No More Dream” is about having higher expectations for yourself, “N.O” implicates parental expectations that are too high. The hook makes reference to prestigious “in-Seoul” and SKY universities (Seoul University, Korea University, Yonsei University) and puts them on the same level as dreams of a big house and big car — dreams as heavy and empty as the reverb on the strings and horns in the background. “Classroom Idea” described an environment where “everybody steps on each other to get ahead”; almost 10 years later, “N.O” repeats this exact description but also asks, “Whose fault is that?”

BTS - BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS [7.43] Hard work that pays off…

Madeleine Lee: Right now, BTS is the best boy band in K-pop (and therefore the world), and “Blood Sweat & Tears” is proof. The song’s of-the-moment tropical house sound is obviously meant to capitalize on current pop trends, but it still retains BTS’s unique character as a group by returning to the romantic, fatalistic mood of “I Need U” and “Run.” But where much of the appeal and atmosphere of those songs came from the beat, this time, in “Blood Sweat & Tears,” it’s the performances that make it. For instance, the slang J-Hope puts into “wonhae manhi manhi” does this same double duty, sounding like both an emulation of some American rappers’ voices and a howl of lonely desperation. The most crucial part, though, is the vocal line’s recurring chorus (“My blood, sweat and tears, my last dance, take it all away”), and Jimin and V in particular deliver each line like it’s the last moment before everything is lost, and they make you believe it. Like BTS, “Blood Sweat & Tears” is a song that tries to accomplish a lot of different things, and thanks to BTS, it does. [9]

Lilly Gray: I listen to a lot of K-pop. I especially enjoy the thrill of comebacks, especially when big names are all stacked against each other, the promise and sugar rush of each batch of flashy, fun singles – but nothing made me lose my goddamn mind this comeback cycle like “Blood, Sweat & Tears.” I had been peripherally aware of BTS before, mostly because my students adored their baby faces, but nothing I had heard prepared me for this. This hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t believe it existed, that a pop song seemingly crafted to my exacting, bizarre expectations was available with a sumptuous, Secret History cosplay video to match. What I’m saying is that this has made me a crazy person, from the first desperate, breathy plead to the surprise Caribbean drums to the exuberant, crotch-grabbing dance moves and just the complete, wild weirdness of it. God! Someone save me from myself! I keep listening for the weak link vocal and there isn’t one; I keep replaying the two textured rap parts to see if there is one I prefer and it’s all just a seamless box. Help me! [9]

Cassy Gress: This is one of the flat-out sexiest songs/videos I’ve heard from a K-pop boy band. Lyrics about bondage, getting drunk on her, taking her deep down in his throat, addiction, and of course “wonhae manhi manhi.” To top it all off, Jimin there at the very end has a VERY strong falsetto, not breathy at all like a lot of falsettos are. Goodness gracious. [7]

Will Rivitz: Breathy falsetto is always a precarious proposition in pop, as it’s always one move in any direction away from being unlistenable (think Joe Jonas, typically an excellent singer, on the chorus of “Cake By The Ocean”), but BTS nails the chorus here. I could do without the “Lean On” ripoff that follows, but it’s not a cardinal sin. [7]

Will Adams: The chopped vocal hook is a nagging product of our time, but the rest actually brings to mind Stargate’s work at the turn of the decade. It’s a respectful bump that’s fine to listen to. Where BTS err is by adding in the falsetto. [6]

Jessica Doyle: Yaoi stories have been in circulation in Japan since the mid-1970s, and I don’t know when or how that trend spread to Korea, or when K-pop managing companies discovered that particular female gaze as a potential market. But trust BTS to head, in the grandest way, back to the source material: Hermann Hesse’s work also inspired Tōma no Shinzō. Musically speaking, the meat of Wings is elsewhere: it makes sense to make the title track relatively thin song (it would be positively tubercular if not for J-Hope’s Wonhae manhi manhi; bless you, Hobi) with room for all those arrows and statues and blindfolds. Sensible, too, to include the unabashedly uplifting, aegyo-and-fire “21st Century Girl” in promotions: it adds up to BTS enthusiastically catering to their devoted, complicated, occasionally destructive, perpetually thirsty, female fanbase. But it’s one thing when the protagonist/object is Earl Dorian Red Gloria (whose adventures turned comic pretty quickly; but BTS has that ground covered too) and another when it’s real people (not to mention that “Jungkook, on a swing, with a lollipop” is the most corrupting game of Clue I’ve ever played). So, then: is this turn by a group that’s been grappling with expressions of just-post-adolescent masculinity a welcome embrace of a wider range of expressions of female sexuality, or just a slightly more novel method of cash-grabbing exploitation? Oh, hell, with this group, why not both? [7]

Alfred Soto: The best of the K-pop bands babble about chocolates like Savage Garden mumbling about cherry cola in “I Want You,” and the guitars glisten over a reggeton beat. What the hell are BTS up to? Fuck knows. That’s why they never bore. [7]

AGUST D - AGUST D [6.50] The penny drops too late as your editor only just realises “Agus” is “Suga” backwards.

Iain Mew: I hope his tongue technology came with a heavy usage warranty. [7]

Madeleine Lee: Two years ago, Suga of BTS introduced his “Agust D” persona in the group’s “Killer” cypher track, with a verse showing him at his most crotch-grabbing and outrageous. His proper debut as Agust D is basically a song-length expansion of his “Killer” rap, repeating phrases almost wholesale (“doesn’t matter if I’m wack or fake”) and turning its most triple-skull-emoji boast into the chorus: “Sending you to Hong Kong with my rap, my tongue technology.” He’s without a doubt one of the better K-pop idol producers and idol rappers currently active, but I’ve always been more impressed by the producing than the rapping, and the same is true here. Lyrically, “Agust D” is a manifesto we’ve heard from him before, never mind other idol rappers, and that spelling refrain is exhausting by the seventh or eighth go-around. But the way he’s handled “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World” makes an able foil, chopped and spun into pure triumphant sonics. [5]

Alfred Soto: Jukeboxes who lament the dearth of rappers with booming voices need to hear Agust’s stentorian huffing and puffing, which owes a debt to Eminem and Linkin Park. I’m not sure what else is going – good horns though – but it sounds important. [6]

Edward Okulicz: Emphasising “S-T-D” as part of your name is Comedy ESL at its most tragic, as if Jay(-)Z had interrupted the chorus of “Izzo” to tell the listener “by the way, I have herpes.” On the other hand “tongue technology” is Comedy ESL at its best. A line that looks that whimsical, when the flow immediately brings to mind a fictional psychotic dictator is a bit of a head-fake, but the fanfare and James Brown sample make all the noise sound like a party. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: “Agust D” is a frenetic and excitable song helmed by a rapper adept enough to sound at home on a beat more American than the average Korean artist is usually awarded. Maybe that’s why it makes me uneasy; Agust D’s proficiency, his speedy, growling flow that seems too skilled for what one would expect a Western artist who isn’t black to possess, his Just Blaze-derived production, reminds me of OG Maco’s criticisms of the similarly not-quite-K-pop Keith Ape track “It G Ma.” What happens when a boy-band MC doesn’t remain sufficiently boy-band? In some ways, this is a question for all of us who aren’t American: what cultural borrowings are we entitled to, and what foreign history and context must we understand to embark upon them? But it’s also something for Americans to deal with too: what does globalization mean for a cultural hegemon? (Beyond whining about trade pacts, that is.) What does it mean to have the privilege of having your own culture being, in many ways, a global culture – a privilege that extends to all Americans, not just those who are advantaged in their own nation? [8]

Adaora Ede: I’m not quite sure that I’ll buy what you’re selling if you package it in the form of a repetitive GarageBand loop, but I’d probably be more willing to put it on layaway if you told me that the very generic MIDI beat in the background of your song is actually a distilled version of the big band intro from James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”. BTS Suga’s mixtape pre-single goes a more antiquated route for song style: who out here is still using heavy brass based samples since Kanye quit it? Agust D shows bravado, unsurprisingly so, as his rapid fire verbiage would not be that unusual of a BTS cypher B-side. In fact, one of the raunchier hooks in this song (“Get turned on by my tongue technology”) is a pretty direct reference to another just as raunchy lyric in BTS’ Cypher Pt. 3. I do like a bit of a boastroduction track (even excusing the production), but render me unimpressed by an inability to distinguish oneself from one’s group. That name change feels jarring for nothing. [5]

EXO - MONSTER [5.70] We’ll call you whatever you want, Chen…

Madeleine Lee: If SM Entertainment’s new Pantone-and-impeccable house beats aesthetic is getting too samey for your liking – or too tasteful – here comes zombie “Overdose” to save the day, a broody gnarl of electro-trap-R&B limbs. It trips in and out of a minor key, knocks over some drums and slips on a string section, but always lands on its feet for the chorus (which is, as expected, pristine). I appreciate the effort to Keep K-Pop Weird, but this is too funereal to be fun, and it somehow sounds both empty and overthought. I’ll admit that it sounds better the more I hear it, but still, I’ll take the one with the impeccable beat over this. [5]

Crystal Leww: So much EDM-pop that leans more pop than EDM sounds so goofy these days, but “Monster” perhaps shows that it just needs the right production team and performers to pull it off. I love that this is so committed to the maximalism of it all; Exo are committed to the idea of being called monster all the way throughout and everything is at full throttle, despite the lurching quality of the production. [6]

Thomas Inskeep: The verses and bridges give me a “Formation” vibe, while the chorus is pure, slickly-choreographed menace – but no less effective for that. Shiny-sounding, dark-feeling K-pop on a hip-hop tip. [6]

Edward Okulicz: The method, if not the ingredients are exactly the same as “Monster,” so I listened to them in a quick A-B comparison. This one’s more successful at evoking the idea of pure, creeping menace than “Overdose” was of imminent danger, and it has a better chorus, so it gets more points. [7]

Patrick St. Michel: For all the clanging and tension-rich build, “Monster” is a K-pop boy band cut at its heart, and the chorus offers a something that feels apt for just that. Nothing incredible but solid, a nice reminder the new age of K-pop can hit on all the good stuff as the groups that came before them. And deliver raps that I can’t decide are good or goofy. [6]

Cassy Gress: This song is “Treat You Better”’s Persona. There’s bits and pieces of things I’d like here (the block chord harmonies in the chorus, the surprise switch into F major for a beat or two), but they get stomped out by Exo referring to themselves as a monster, and apparently equating being controlling and abusive with attractive and sexy. [4]

Brad Shoup: The throwback tonalities of the chorus are remarkable: Exo puts on an existential shrug. The synth chimes like mourning bells. As much as they invoke monsterdom, they’re not promising menace. [6]

Adaora Ede: “Monster” falls into the same realm of EXO’s other edgy, bass heavy tracks: industrial drum beats, harmonic belted out choruses, alphabetic rap verses. I don’t like or dislike this more than 2013’s “Overdose” or 2012’s “Mama” because this sounds like exactly how SM Entertainment has always created all of their ‘dark’ concept tracks for EXO: to be a slightly more trendy version of whatever they did last time, just current enough. “Monster” integrates a trap-inflected intro verse (she’s got.me.goin.crazy whoooo!) to change it up this time, but it’s not enough to captivate. The effect of the mysterious bad boy concept remains stagnant. [4]

Taylor Alatorre: Nice chorus you got there. Be a shame if someone were to weigh it down with some haltingly percussive verses, a hilariously overwrought bridge, and a two-note car alarm that never… goes… away. Oh wait, you guys already did all that to yourselves. Well, that’s what you get for inhabiting the jerkass role with such gleeful abandon. The brazenness of the villainy is sort of refreshing, but a rudimentary sense of shame might’ve prevented lines like “I’m sorry you make me so crazy” from making it past the recording booth. [5]

Anjy Ou: On about my 5th listen to this song, I picked up on the Dawn Richard influence - the vocal uptick and the production are straight from “Bombs”. Watching EXO dance to this song a third time, I noticed the Aaliyah-influenced choreo (RIP, still the queen of dancing to downtempo tracks). And THEN I discovered that it was co-written by Rodnae “Chikk” Bell. Black girls and women continue to shape the culture, even years after the fact, even when they don’t get credit for it. I was going to like this anyway: it’s EXO’s typical frownyfaced R&B pop with better rapping (bless you, Deepflow), fantastic drums in the bridges, and lots of Chen and Kai vocals. But seeing girls like me actively shaping the music I love that doesn’t always love me back? Hits me right there. [8]

2. Anjy’s blurb makes me appreciate this song a lot more as an object even if I still don’t like it as a song.

OH MY GIRL - WINDY DAY [6.75] Are we blown away?

Madeleine Lee: If you’ve never heard “Windy Day” before, I don’t want to spoil it for you, so go listen to it now. Then come back here so we can talk about how good it is at leading its listener down the garden path, with a disposable verse and a chorus that’s all sunshine and flowers, before it blasts you away with a power droning string hook out of nowhere. There have been two major girl group trends in K-pop over the last year: a revived interest in the “pure” image (see: GFriend, Lovelyz), and the “girl crushes” that not only appeals, as usual, to men, but makes (assumed straight) fangirls fall in love with their coolness and charisma (see: the recent uptick in girl groups covering boy group choreography). While this might seem like a dichotomy, Oh My Girl have released a pure single and a girl crush single back to back, and now they’ve given us one that’s both. “Windy Day” thrives on the contrast created by putting these two styles next to each other, and on the thrill of making a connection between them. [8]

Jessica Doyle: I’ve started to rush to Oh My Girl singles in anticipation of those unexpected delights that startle me and keep my attention. With “Cupid” it’s not so much the marching-band drums themselves as the combination of the marching-band drums and that “I see you,” which makes the song the love child of a marching band and “Piano in the Dark,” and if a group is willing to start with the love child of a marching band and “Piano in the Dark,” certainly let’s see what else is on offer. There’s “Closer,” their blandest single to date – yes, well-constructed and a nice platform for inventive choreography, but nonetheless – which still provides the surges in the background and Seunghee’s sudden “Can you hear my cry.” “Liar Liar” is a series of leaps: from Binnie’s “Andhwe, andhwe” to Seunghee’s “roller coaster” to Mimi’s “Pinocchio,” with the collective’s yells as the connective tissue. (While I probably can’t count Seunghee’s face as an unexpected delight, I’d be, er, lying if I left it out.) And now there’s “Windy Day,” which starts out as the coronation music for Actualfax Fairy Princess Hyojung and then gleefully changes course – it’s nothing but the unexpected. The lyrics, the video, and the creeping guitar all suggest uncertainty, but “Windy Day” works because it’s a journey (to be fair, “Closer” is as well), an embrace of the uncertainty, finding excitement in getting swept up. [8]

Thomas Inskeep: Musically it’s like 3 songs mashed into one. Lyrically it’s too cutesy-poo by half. [4]

Katie Gill: There are three distinct parts to “Windy Day”: the bizarrely delicate beginning, the bog-standard good harmonies, girl group chorus, and that vaguely Arabian, vaguely “Come Out and Play” riff, which is easily my favorite part. The overall composition is less of a full song and more of three pieces shoved together to make a song. Still, for all it’s slightly disjointed nature, the end product is something pretty darn good and an annoyingly perfect earworm. [6]

Leonel Manzanares: Saccharine folk that somehow turns into an ABBA outtake and then it goes into a chaotic A phrygian post-chorus. Yet it all still feels native to OMG’s universe. Man, i love my K-pop wild, but i truly flip out when that madness is this well executed. [8]

Alfred Soto: The tinkling piano and harmonies suggest dew drops on flowers or, at worst, too strong a plug-in deodorizer: Febreze, like that. The harmonies are still a bit much on the chorus, but the guitar helps. [7]

Patrick St. Michel: “Windy Day” solves the problem that was at the center of EXID’s “L.I.E” by making the stylistic transitions flow really smoothly, so nothing ever feels jarring or awkward. Alas, Oh My Girl could really use something interesting to happen here, as none of these change-ups leave an impression beyond “oooo, something different!,” and the end result is a skippy song that… well just skips ahead. [4]

Moses Kim: Oh My Girl has quietly emerged over the last year as one of the most intriguing acts in Korean pop, but more importantly as one of the most delightful. “Windy Day” unfurls like a kite string on a warm May afternoon; the strums that set up the beginning weave a light tapestry for Arin and Seunghee to trade lines over before the song hits a slower wind, Yooa’s honeyed vocals working well with Binnie’s gently-posted question of whether her spring has finally found its way back to her. Then there’s that gust of a chorus, strings and vocal melodies and surprisingly prog-metal guitar chords punching upwards and upwards until we soar into the clouds, where a stormier collection of harmonies meets us. And that’s all before we hit the eye of the storm, an earworm of an Arabian Nights riff with choreography to match. But it’s the eight voices that center a ride that in the wrong hands could be vertigo-inducing, riding the track with boundless conviction, playfulness, and joy. [9]

NCT U - THE 7TH SENSE [5.44] According to the Internet, the seventh sense is the doorway to the Universal Self via Unity Consciousness. Discuss…

Patrick St. Michel: Usually, fixating on all the facts surrounding an artist instead of the music does a great disservice to them, but sometimes that other stuff is so fascinating it really does deserve some time. This site is “The Singles Jukebox,” not “The Accelerationist Global Capitalism Chathouse,” so I won’t dwell on the tribble-like idea behind Neo Culture Technology (top that, vaporwave!), but you should definitely read up on it. It also does provide some good context to “The 7th Sense,” primarily why it sounds so generic. It’s a solid approximation of what could be considered the dominant world sound in 2016 – hip-hop-leaning, trap, sparse, Diplo-ish. If you were to build your own pop song, “The 7th Sense” would be a solid template. The saving grace is the lyrics, far more abstract and lonesome then expected, though ironically that’s the one part of the song you have to do any work to figure out. The rest is, as NCT U’s parent company hopes for, easily digestible. [5]

Madeleine Lee: Of the Big Three K-pop entertainment agencies, SM Entertainment has always been the worst at hip-hop. Their stilted, line-by-line style of rapping isn’t much worse than JYP’s, but JYP hasn’t attempted to make trend-chasing rap songs to the extent that SM has and failed. (Awoooo!) But in the BTS era, a boy band that is going to do hip-hop has to do hip-hop right, and SM’s newest group NCT U not only sounds correct in this song, but convincing. It’s mostly thanks to an incredible minimal beat (and of the Big Three, SM still has the best taste in instrumentals), but even the rapping is not embarrassing here. It helps that my countryman Mark is the first rapper to come out of SM with the same kind of slangy, syncopated delivery as the kids in Monsta X and Seventeen, but Ten and Taeyong do just as well with dead-eyed verses that are technically just as artless as EXO’s but seem drawn from a primary source, rather than learned secondhand. Overall, “The 7th Sense” is nothing earth-shattering, but it’s a welcome development, especially since NCT U represents SM’s future: “that’s a long-ass ride” is about as far from “my name is Minho” as you can get. [5]

Cassy Gress: It’s less like a first single from an exciting new international SM concept, and more like the hidden bonus track–a little patchwork, and more of a toss-off than anything that preceded it. With the instruments doing so little, all I can do is focus on the vocals, and that mostly just led me to think about who this sounds like (Drake, Timberlake… Zayn?), rather than anything interesting NCT U was actually doing. [4]

Jonathan Bogart: Whether he or SME means it to or not, Taeyong’s nasal, affectless flow is enough like Drake’s that a suspicion of tryhard bandwagon-jumping hovers over this otherwise mostly-fine slice of self-important miserablism. [5]

Alfred Soto: When they rap sllowwwwly over the lethargic beat, they remind me of Big Sean – for better or worse. [5]

Juana Giaimo: This may not differ a lot from the hip-hop and R&B minimalistic tracks that often go around on the internet. However, the gloomy vibe adds an almost uncomfortable depth that is hard to put into words but that lingers once the song finishes. [7]

Brad Shoup: I’m all for singles that offer a complete traumnovelle of self-actualization. Existential new-jack voicings and nagging sing-talking, all over a blinking bass melody and trap drums like creaking doors. [8]

Leonel Manzanares: The intro, with the droning bass and the distorted chant (which kinda sounds like a Middle Eastern wind instrument) anticipated something sparse, nocturnal, but ultimately engaging. What we got is a decent rap song – killer second verse, though – that stayed on the edge of great and never quite crossed the line. Quick lesson, kids: sparse does not mean stationary. [6]

Jessica Doyle: Those background layers are beautiful; so it’s all the more puzzling that the vocals seem constructed not to match. The dissonance I hear doesn’t let up until almost three minutes in, and then only briefly. SM might have refrained from smoothing things out to subtly suggest that this new group is somehow more challenging and less eager to please than past products. In which case I like the theory but find myself shying away from the execution. [4]

I.O.I - CRUSH [5.86] Hey, we ran out of words, give us a break…

Alfred Soto: This newly minted K-pop group curls their vocals around bits purloined from Kesha and Grimes with the zealotry of the converted. [5]

Brad Shoup: All those OMGs are Minajian; the bridge is frightening, like Britney in high dudgeon. “Crush” is frantic but not desperate. It’s like experiencing a rainstorm in a car with good tread. [7]

Cassy Gress: I.O.I. has the problem that I imagine SNSD and Super Junior had when they first came out - there are way too many members to smush into one three-minute song. If I.O.I. sticks around for a while, then familiarity will help a lot with that issue. Aside from that, “kungkwang oo-oh-oo-oh” is a great hook, and lyrically this evokes some of the chaos of a new crush, though the sound doesn’t evoke much more than “dance.” [6]

Thomas Inskeep: This is supposedly “trapical [not a typo] Dutch funk,” which I think is someone having a bit of fun, because to my ears it sounds like contemporary dance-pop that gets a little pneumatic on its chorus. Ridiculously fun. [6]

Iain Mew: “Crush” reminds me of the all-action approach of the kind of songs that got me into K-pop in the first place. It’s not just the passage of time that means that keeping up constant energy isn’t enough on its own though. Ideally this kind of thing should sound like it was thrown together in ten minutes but also that the ten minutes was of such magical productivity that there would be no way to improve on it. This sounds like it was thrown together in ten minutes and pressing deadlines kept anyone from going back and fixing it to fit together properly. [5]

Patrick St. Michel: If you haven’t watched Produce 101… well, maybe don’t read too much about the people who appear in the “Crush” video, because you should really spend a week of your life burning through the just-finished show, wherein a new K-pop girls group is put together in a show half American Idol and half AKB48 election. There is no way I can listen to “Crush” without being a bit biased – mainly because I’m so happy for you, Kim So-hye, who likes collecting trash and playing the ocarina – but it does a good job of, well, highlighting all the things these women were judged on, gathered in a tight package. It peaks with the chorus, a nice electro explosion, but it’s so good it makes the forced elements (errr, the rap) feel OK. [7]

Madeleine Lee: In the period where most of my K-pop-loving peers were following Produce 101, I became obsessed with the Japanese franchise Love Live! School Idol Project. It follows nine girls who become “school idols” to keep their beloved school from closing, but are really just a front to sell character goods and CD singles. The songs are solidly written and hit on the major strains of mainstream J-pop: the uplifting anime theme song, the sparkly electropop song, the epic rock song, etc. For every song, each character’s voice actress records the entire thing, and then the line division is adjusted in the mixing. This probably isn’t how “Crush” was made, but it has that same quality of sounding both highly individualized (the performances) and completely impersonal (the assembly). I realize this accusation could be made towards many large K-pop groups, and that this tension between the individual and the interchangeable is the nature of Produce 101 itself. Still, I can’t help but hear this song as a fill-in-the-blanks template for whoever the top 11 contestants happened to be, and it doesn’t do much to convince me that it’s not. Basically, if you’re listening for your best girl, you will enjoy her part and probably wish she had more. If you’re not, it’s a lightly clubby girl group track with shouty bits and a smooth chorus, and the song that description makes you think of is probably more compelling. Another Love Live!-obsessed friend wondered what the Korean equivalent of its accurately generic J-pop might be like; between the “35 Girls 5 Concepts” sampler and “Crush,” Produce 101 seems to be the answer. [5]

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