"I Feel You" by Wonder Girls, Thursday, June 10, 2021

The whirlwind career of Wonder Girls is an interesting read. They were the first South Korean pop group to chart on Billboard's Hot 100 and toured with the Jonas Brothers; their career looked like it would be quite promising. But the members wouldn't stick around. The band originally had 4Minute member Hyuna, but her solo career would pull the singer in another direction. Then there was Sunmi, the singer who turned to K-pop to make support her family after her father died of complications of tuberculosis. But just when the group was blowing up in 2009, she left to focus on her academics. The group went on hiatus after Sunye got married and moved with her husband to Haiti to be missionaries and Sohee left to focus on acting. That was 2013.

WHEN I'M ALONE, I FEEL YOUR TOUCH. Korean summer is much like summer in North Carolina and Tennessee with a few key differences. The temperature climbs steadily throughout the spring. April can be pleasant, but my first year in Chuncheon, I was ready for the air conditioning in late April, as it was hard to sleep at night. Housing is a big key here, though. My second apartment in Chuncheon didn't have air conditioning. It was brutally hot for about a month, so I just stayed up late until it got cool enough to sleep. Then I moved to Gyeongsan on campus. 2015 was a brutally hot summer, and Daegu had the nickname, Daefrica (Daegu + Africa). My apartment had air conditioning, but I had a roommate that left windows open, and it stopped working. 2015 was a pretty extreme summer, but it's also a good example of what happens in the summer. First it's hot from late May to mid June. This heat is sometimes dry, some days humid. And if you don't have a car as many Koreans get by on public transportation, this means a lot of walking outside if you want to do anything fun. I had a long summer vacation, so I did a lot that summer. But that's a story for another day. In mid-June, the rainy season starts for about a month. And you get soaked, as the rain seems to come from every direction. Finally August combines the heat and the humidity with a few intermittent showers. As Korea is quite hot, people tend to dress appropriately. It's a time when shorts get shorter, shirts look tighter on muscle. Everyone is sweaty and soaked from the rain. 

WE'RE BACK! In the summer 2015, the Wonder Girls' record label, JYP, announced that Sunmi would be rejoining the group, and they would be releasing new music in early August. The album was appropriately titled Reboot, and the lead single was a late-'80s concept song of the summer "I Feel You." And boy was that summer a hot one. In perfect '80s video fashion, the girls pretend to play instruments while dressed in sexy one piece jumpsuits and high heels. The video is literally dripping with sexiness as the girls melt ice on themselves and get splashed with water. This wet, sexy look would be done again in Sunmi's solo 2018 Waterbomb Festival Performance after the Wonder Girls split up for good. Sunmi has continued her career using her sex appeal to boost her music, but "I Feel You," for me, is the song of the summer of 2015, even though it was released late. It was a summer filled with fun and sorrow. It was the summer of youth I never afforded myself growing up. It is a summer I was too old to enjoy then and certainly too old to ever repeat again.

Lyrics:

English Translation. Original Korean

Read “Wonder Girls - I Feel You (English Translation)” by Genius English Translations on Genius

Read “I Feel You” by Wonder Girls on Genius