“Get a Guitar” by RIIZE, Tuesday, May 28, 2024
DRAWING SUNSHINE IN THE RHYTHM. Last month, Slate’s Hit Parade podcast delved into the history of boybands. Host Chris Molanphy first guided listeners through the murky definition of a boy band--simply male members in a band who happen to play music aimed at a younger audience of mostly young women. The debate about artistic merit of boyband music is debated among critics along with whether or not one of the most critically acclaimed bands, The Beatles--at any point in their career--, qualifies as a boyband. One of the points that I took from that episode which I will apply to my musical criticism henceforth is the logical fallacy that critics dismiss boybands simply on the idea that rock is artistic and pop is merely a fleeting trend. It was an idea I had when I was young cruising the radio dial. There were classic rock stations but classic pop was either adult contemporary or oldies. Disco didn’t have a cool place on the dial. I thought that the ‘00s boybands and solo artists would fade into obscurity, becoming the new disco and the people who listened to it would be the most uncool moms in the grocery store. Maybe that’s true in kids' eyes today, but with Korean boybands entering international markets, it feels like the Y2K pop sound has never been more relevant.
FINGERS SNAPPING LIKE ONE, TWO, FIVE. In eighth grade, I joined my friend Nick’s band. We played in his basement. He was the coolest kid among his peers, which was not a hard feat in our small Adventist community. His mom was often at work and pretty much hands-off, involved mostly in her own life, which left Nick to his own teenage devices, and the rumors about him with a $200 phone bill on German porn made him a legend. While I was forming my musical taste, for a while I got into everything he listened to. It was the Backstreet Boys in seventh grade, but by eighth grade, that was “gay music.” As rhythm guitarists playing chords found online, he determined that the only music worth listening to was by artists who played their own instruments or at least played an instrument. We kept adding to the rules of what we thought was a true artistic expression and amending the rules as we thought of exceptions. I wasn’t a particular fan of Cèline Dion, but I thought of her voice as an instrument, so a true musician must play an instrument unless that musician’s instrument was their voice. I fell out of touch with Nick in high school, and my musical tastes expanded, but somehow I still feel like I need to justify pop music as artistic--maybe that’s the thesis of my blog. Of course, pop musicians are talented. South Korean Idols, for example, train for years before debuting. Many of the stars play instruments or learned them in their youth, though the industry doesn’t often display this in their pop concepts. Likewise, the musicians eighth grade me shrugged off turned out to be brilliant in music production or songwriting. And looking at K-pop, for example, the art may not lie in the music itself, but in the franchising and the conceptual art. And isn’t dance an art, too? I’m not sure if I’d classify RIIZE as artistic, but is the argument even relevant? I like dissecting culture, but I’m done with the hipster arguments of my youth. And if anyone objects, you can get a guitar!
Read the English version on Genius.
Read the Korean lyrics on Genius.
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