NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

  In 2021 Girls5eva premiered on Peacock . The premise of the show was a ridiculous one-hit-wonder girl group from the early ‘00s gets sampled by an up-and-coming rapper, Lil Stinker , which causes the disbanded Girls5eva to reunite for their now middle-aged fans. The show; created by the writer and co-producer of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Meredith Scardino , and comedy mogel Tina Fey; reexamines fictionalized relics of the new millennium in the light of the ‘20s cultural climate. In the show’s first season, the remaining members of Girls5eva--ironical the group is now four members after singer Ashley died in an infinity pool accident--reconcile the problematic lyrics of their early songs. For a one-hit-wonders, it turns out they had many songs and videos, which are revealed over the show’s now three seasons.  A LOVE THAT’S ARTIFICIAL, BUT HIS WALLET MAKES US HAPPY. In the second season of Girls5eva,  the group writes new material and tries to break back into cult...

I talked about yesterday how Beenzino started my appreciation for Korean Hip-Hop. That appreciation turned into a love for the genre in 2016 when I joined a Korean gym, and it was mostly because of the winner of the fifth season of the massive reality program in South Korea called Show Me the Money , BewhY (비와이). By 2016, South Korea was fully in the middle of peak Hip-Hop culture. My students weren’t listening to Idol music but knew all the words to the rappers who were on Mnet’s Show Me the Money series. I found it kind of funny how the show censored Korean profanity while English f-bombs were allowed to be broadcasted! In the midst of the profanity storm that came with Korean Hip-Hop (no judgment intended), devout Christian BewhY’s rap career started. I’M SO INDEPENDENT . Lee Byeong Yoon (이병윤) is a charismatic performer. Some music critics have compared his melodic rapping to Drake , but when I heard him, I’d never heard anything like it. Much of BewhY’s sound comes from famed Kor...

South Korean rapper Beenzino (빈지노), not to be confused with American rapper Benzino , began his career by posting his songs on the Korean Hip-Hop community site DC Tribe in 2010. Rapper Simon Dominic discovered Beenzino on the website and eventually, Beenzino started getting more exposure through rap festival performances in South Korea. Beenzino performed with two hip-hop duos, Jazzyfact and Hotclip as well as garnering features on songs by Verbal Jint , Epik High , Dok2 , and other Korean Hip-Hop artists as the genre was entering a burgeoning success in the 2010s. Along with producer Shimmy Twice , Beenzino released Lifes Like in 2010 with Jazzyfact. The next year, the duo released the single " Always Awake " before taking a hiatus until their 2017 EP, Waves Like . WHEN THE CITY OF SEOUL SLEEPS. Following his collaborative effort in Jazzyfact, Beenzino signed with 1llionare Records , a small but powerful Hip-Hop label in South Korea. Founded by rappers Dok2 and The Quie...

TOMORROW X TOGETHER , or TXT called by their fans, were the first group from Korea to headline Lollapalooza. The x is pronounced as "by" so the band is called "Tomorrow by Together." The group has been one of the biggest K-Pop boy bands since their debut in 2019. Signed to  Big Hit Entertainment , home of  BTS  and the first boy band signed to the label since the Bangtan Boys, TXT debuted five years after their label mates. The lyrics of today's song, " Lo$er = Lo🩷er " touch on the bleak state of Millennials and Gen. Z, especially due to financial status; however, TOMORROW X TOGETHER's music is optimistic. The band's motto as it appears on their  website  is: "Come together   under one dream in hopes of building a better tomorrow."  

It seems like a lifetime ago when the United States was enraptured in a gaslighting, dogmatic, and ultimately illogical argument that only heterosexual couples could marry. Even before the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples had a fundamental right under the protection of the U.S. Constitution to marry and receive the same benefits as heterosexual couples, the opposition to gay marriage was thinly veiled homophobic stereotyping and appeals to Christian values. But reversing centuries of homophobic biases to gain both popular and judicial support for marriage equality was a feat of activism, which often traces its roots back to the late ‘70s and the short-lived political career of Harvey Milk. However, marriage equality was unimaginable to the so-called “Mayor of Castro Street” as it was incongruent with the polyamorous sexual preferences of the fifth district member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. I CAN’T CHANGE. In 2012, Ma...

Today I'm going to update my  Under the   Covers  playlist on Apple Music. Every now and then I like to update my playlists with some of my new discoveries. Some of the covers on this playlist may make us long for the original, but ultimately, I think that the song I'm basing the playlist on, today's song, " Circles " covered by  Boyce Avenue , actually sounds better than the genre-bending artist  Post Malone 's  original , though I still like it.   

  Listening to  Paper Route  makes me wonder, what if  Coldplay , after recording  X & Y   had continued making electronic music and honed in on their lyrics.  Paper Route has a solid pop-rock band, on par with any of their contemporaries (i.e.  OneRepublic , Coldplay), but their somewhat eccentric fidelity to their craft, recording their albums themselves in old Tennessee mansions to let the natural acoustics reverberate on the record, had cemented them as an indie rock band. " Balconies " was kind of Paper Route's first and last hit. The band's music had been featured in movies and television shows, but "Balconies" got them a late-night performance slot on  Seth Meyers . As one of the most obvious hits from their third album,  Real Emotion ,  the song was released to radio but didn't do too well on the charts. After touring to support the album, the band went on "an indefinite hiatus." However, as the band has had long gaps be...

n 2017, it had been five years since The Killers released new music, and even longer since they were a “household name.” Lead singer Brandon Flowers talks about starting with the song “ Rut ,” Wonderful, Wonderful ’s third track, which defined the band’s new direction. While The Killers had been on hiatus had released his second solo record, The Desired Effect . Also before recording The Killers’ fifth record, Flowers moved out of his beloved hometown of “ The Fabulous Las Vegas ” which turned out to be a bad place to raise a family in the ‘10s. Still, digging out of the musical rut wasn’t easy. Flowers found on Wonderful, Wonderful it was ok to write about his family.   DON’T NEED NO ADVICE, I GOT A PLAN.  The first single from  Wonderful, Wonderful,  though, " The Man ," doesn't fall into the typical storytelling songs we come to expect from The Killers, rather "The Man" is a bragging song. The song was featured in the  Netflix  original film  T...

In the '70s Alternative Rock was a distinguishing term to separate mainstream classic rockers from experimental, independent rock bands. Sometimes called College Rock in the '80s and the '90s, it can be difficult to distinguish between mainstream rock and alternative rock of the '90s and '80s. More recently, the genre has been split between Alternative Rock and Alternative. At the heart of Alternative music, however, it is classified as genre-blending.   Judah & the Lion   had been cultivating a folk rock hip-hop sound from their inception, blending bluegrass instruments with modern sounds. However, the band's sophomore album defined the style of music they were making:   Folk Hop N' Roll .  HEY, MY LIFE IS REAL GREAT.  Founded by lead singer and guitarist  Judah Akers  when he met an eclectic group of musicians at  Belmont University  in Nashville, Tennessee, Judah & the Lion started out as a Christian Rock act though started to dist...

I magine being a new band in 2019, releasing your first EP which has earned enough hype to put you on a big tour with a veteran band, only to have that tour canceled because the industry came to a halt with the pandemic. That’s what happened to brothers Sam and Ben Taylor and their friend Nathan Beaton of Paradise Now . The Welsh band did not tour with Disciple in 2020 as planned, however, they released an extra EP called Lockdown Mixtape to lead up to their full-length debut, We Never Die , both released in 2021. The band's social media has been quiet since the release of the LP . IT’S GETTING OLD. In 2019, Tooth & Nail Records revealed that they had signed a new band. The label posted a photo of the band's silhouette and asked fans to guess who had been signed. I commented " dc talk ?" which got a few laughs from the community. Sometimes when a band is signed with Tooth & Nail Records, listeners know who the band is. Often it's a band connected to the ...