#crazy form

Crazy Form

One of the traits that sets Ateez apart from other boygroups of their 'generation' and those that came after is that they're swaggery young men rather than unusually tall school boys. (TxT are in the unusually tall school boy mould, and though I don't know a lot about them yet, my impression was that Enhypen are in the young men category but they don't have the swagger of Ateez. They have something else, but this is not an Enhypen post.) Ateez's initial appeal to me is that they were free and wild and also Kpop. There's an exciting tension there, because Kpop to me is ballet - it's quite strict and rigid, so someone who can give off the feel of being untrammeled is very exciting. And the 'group lore' that came with Ateez was that they fought the odds and won, so there was maybe even some substance supporting the swagger.

Crazy Form is the second sexiest Ateez song to me, because it specifically has all this Boy Energy that can't really be replicated by girls at all, or by the guys who do the like, whispery breathy songs. The fun of Ateez is that a significant number of them can actually do the whisper-breathy songs (what's called Refreshing = 청량 in the Korean pop music parlance) as well as this louder, more in your face, shouty singing. And it's actually a really funny song. To top it off, the choreography they put together for it makes visual puns that add additional meaning to the song lyrics.

I mean, honorable mention must also be made of Wooyoung pulling off one of the most delightful deliveries of all time - the 흔들어 Body 왔다갔다 part - which sounds witty and sassy and fresh every single time you hear it. Perfect.

But that part is very much an earned delight, because the song structure builds to an orgasmic conclusion.

Crazy Form sounds very busy and kinetic, overall, but actually is quite a measured, slow song, insofar as delivery goes, and the build up is much closer to Ravel's Bolero. (Western Classical Music nerd interlude coming up - I will try to keep this short.). Ravel's Bolero starts out with a tense snare drum beat and a very sweet flute playing a pretty tune over it. This goes on for almost a minute, and then then other instruments come in, layer by layer. The piece also gets progressively louder and louder, until at the end of the 15 minute piece, the entire orchestra, including all the loudest instruments, like the timpani and the whole brass section, is going full blast.

Crazy Form's underlying musical structure follows Bolero's structure, but in a compressed way, since it's a 3 minute pop song and not a 15 minute classical piece. The initial synth melody that plays as Hongjoong urges everyone to Get Up stays in the forefront of the song for everyone else to build their vocal on top of it. Until the climax of the song starts around 2:30, with the louder drums, the insinuation that 'something big is coming' is provided by that simple melody, and it comes back for the grand finale as well.

If you really hear the singing piece by piece, everyone is exhaling long breaths to get their notes out, and the emphasis note is the middle of each phrase. Mingi's delivery in particular, if you listen to JUST the vocals, shows you just how slow this song is, actually as a song. He goes, gajeo-waaaaaaaaaaaaa nae trophy, sidong guuuuuuuuuuuuuuurlo yi turbine when he takes over from the previous vocalist. The lyrics say "Time is ticking' 너무 빨라"but the actual tune is slow.

The busy, urgent feeling comes from the really fun ad libs in this song - the Ha's and the Ooh's, the Hey Oh, the truly obnoxious Ah-yah-yah-yah that keeps interrupting the 'main' vocal delivery of each part until it completely takes over the song itself, so that the grand finale is a shouting match between the instrumental and the singers.

The lyrics are also quite contradictory, too, given the sound and the look. Mingi is yelling at people to bring him his trophy (not give me a trophy), which is such a dick move, but then he's like, I'm a good boy actually, my flag is green. The lyrics pretend to not care ("Close your eyes if this looks ugly to you") but that's a lie, because the song talks about having ambition and wanting to go up, and wants you to know twice over, that they've circumnavigated the globe and been to every continent, and then insists that we all SING ALONG AND DANCE NOW.

Tension - sonic as well as narratively within the song - is one of the driving forces of a song I find sexy, and contradiction and tension also fuel much of the energy of the music video. They're frequently in military-looking outfits in the MV bust also all wearing really pretty and extremely visible eye makeup. That MV is the most feminine Seonghwa has ever looked with the long permed hair and the corset (??) vest, while the song is SO macho with all of them yelling and hooting. They also do a moonwalk exactly during 달나라로 가자 (lterally: let's go to the moon) which tickles me every time I see it, because it's FUNNY.

The underlying music, the sonic experience of the song itself, the lyrics, the delivery, the dance, the kpop-apparatus around the live performance of the song all work together during Crazy Form to give you a pretty intense shot of testosterone, and takes you from a slow, gentle beginning to a screaming, relentlessly powerful climax.

Ice On My Teeth

Ice On My Teeth is a sexy song for the exact opposite reasons from Crazy Form.

One of the things that makes me a bit of a female supremacist is that straight women tend to have a lot more complicated and flexible an erotic imagination than straight men. If the story behind the feeling is interesting enough, we're willing to at least hear something out to the end. From what I've seen them express of their inner selves in public (in novels which tends to get deepest about the workings of the inner self, films and tv, porn and public declarations) straight men can't find any story compelling enough to overlook the absolute lack of a physical attraction in their imaginings. (In real life they settle quite a lot, for whatever woman is convenient, but that's a pointlessly clear eyed aside in this insane blathering on about two kpop songs).

Of course, if you can combine really hot people with an interesting or intriguing backstory that hints at complication, disaster, secrets, loss, yearning and so on, then that's perfect, and that's kind of the mood that IOMT generates.

IOMT implies a complicated backstory by sourcing three sounds in addition to the usual Ateez sexy boys with sexy voices situation - the mournful, slightly-blurred voice, sex of the singer uncertain because of remixing, that opens the song with This isn't what I wanted. This isn't how I thought it, babe. Look at we started.

There's classical music liberally sourced throughout this, which of course I'm going to like, and I believe the sources that say they utilized Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (hence the ballerinas in the music video) though I find it difficult to hear. Swan Lake is actually about a man who is a monsterfucker (a bird-woman who retains a lot of bird movements even in human form), who dies because he's unable to solve the problem of being a monsterfucker. (Very satisfying. Go to the ballet, everyone.)

The third sound source is the very funereal, wordless Oo Oooing at the end,

The general mood of this song is that something devastating, so terrible that you can't even name it, has happened in the recent past. Someone hurt someone, so the person who sustained the wound is coiled in repose, trying to figure out where to go next.

IOMT ranks to me as one of those songs that makes the least amount of lyrical sense. The opening lines about buying diamonds at the dentist, the artless incompetence of rhyming tennis with tennis before giving up and going with rhyming dentist with finish - it makes all the words kind of irrelevant, and you're just soaking in the mood then.

It's all so secretive, where they're saying things to each other that are apparently comprehensible among them, (How many glasses? Oh, eight. How are we, which could also be, What about us? What are you - also could be -What are you up to?) but are basically gibberish to those that are not insiders.

Well, when there are insiders and you are NOT on the inside, you want to join. This is a clever rhetorical move.

Writing this made me reread the lyrics and I realized that this was also about a woman, much like many of the songs on In Your Fantasy were. Huh! 바로 make it flow, 그녀는 getting close 웃음 위에 보여, 반짝이는 shining stone (she is getting close)

Full disclosure: I’m more or less caught up with their performances only from now backwards to the whole World arc, so I chose between what I know. They have shittons of memorable performances, some beautiful, some heartwarming, some really badass ones, but this one stands out to me and it's imho a memorable performance due to its exceptionally high wtf factor.

I mean, I cannot even imagine the reaction - watching it for the first time - of casual kpop fans and of all the ones not deeply versed in their lore. Want to talk about the space theme in your face and out of nowhere? (and I mean it in relation with their previous eras) Or about Seongwha emerging from his helmet with bunny ears in the intro? Or the whole bunch of bunnies escorting Hongjoong on a throne and then dancing with them for the whole performance without any apparent reason, at least for the uninitiated? Moreover, wanna talk about the extremely obnoxious puffy chrome silver outfits? They shouldn’t work, yet they still do, no, even better, yet they still are some of the best outfits I’ve seen them wear.

It’s a work of art and pure satire at the same time. The dancebreak in the middle is fire - I especially love Yunho’s bit cause it really drives home how much of a dancing powerhouse he is - and they also did really well in terms of general performance.

So yeah, there surely are a lot of performances more cool and/or loved by the fandom, more recurrent ones while reminiscing about the ‘good old times’, but this one stuck for me, because it’s different, it’s one of the times they decided not to take themselves too seriously and didn't directly go the ‘we are so cool’ way, and yet at the same time they perfectly delivered the message (the same reason why I love Work stages so much tbh).

Long story short, this performance is a work of contrasts and dichotomies so dear to my little fan heart (and as a plus I really love Crazy Form so yeah, it’s a win win).