“Hey! Hey!” by TWS, Monday, July 1, 2024

 

Last month TWS kicked off 여름방학 (summer vacation) with the lead single to their second mini album Summer Beat!  Peaking at # 125 on Korea’s Gaon chart “hey! hey!” wasn’t a successful single to follow “Plot Twist,” their number 2 hit. But Pledis Entertainment’s conceptual optimistic teen boy band may not have me interested in the daily life of the boys in the band,” I’d certainly like to find out what composers of the song were listening to inspire the pop-punk guitar riff that appears throughout the song, especially noticeable at the beginning. I’m not sure what made this song flop in Korea--maybe the guitar, maybe the overly optimistic sound in dark times--but I think that “hey! hey!” deserves another taste. On the surface, it seems like a fizzy throw-away track, but I think more is going on.

I WANT TO CRY OUT OUR DREAM FROM THE WORLD’S PEAK. Opening with a ten-second guitar riff sets “hey! hey!” immediately in the past--or maybe a future when guitar music has actually made a comeback in Korea several years after Olivia Rodrigo finally catches on here. The guitar chords are strummed fast setting the tempo of the song, though only at 92bpm. The E-flat minor riff adds a bit of contrasting melancholy with the propensity of the song, adding rare musical nuance to K-pop. There are several songs that “hey! hey!” remind me of. The first was the guitar riff that opens Michael W. Smith’s 1998 album Live the Life. After 54 seconds of New Age piano on “Missing Person,” Smith uncharacteristically launches into a rock song. The Michael W. Smith guitar seems an unlikely inspiration for TWS’s composition. My next thought was “The Boys of Summer,” particularly The Ataris’ 2003 cover. If the concept of TWS is ‘90s and early ‘00s nostalgia, the song is a perfect candidate for the inspiration of the “hey! hey!” The song was a top 2o Billboard hit in 2003. I’m not sure if the rock track made its way to South Korea, but some pop-punk had a short life in the early ‘00s. The other song “hey! hey!” resembles is “급" or “Fear” from Show Me the Money 4 Episode 5. 


OUR PASSION BURNS AT EQUAL TEMPERATURES. “Missing Person,” “The Boys of Summer,” and “Fear” may sound similar to “hey! hey!” Even if one of these songs inspired the musical backdrop of TWS’s June 6th single, the song takes a far more optimistic tone. Unlike “Fear” in which TWS’s millennial hyungs (Korean term for males’ older brothers, often used not as a familial term) Mino and Taeyang talked about existential dread, “hey! hey!” takes on that dread but counters it with optimism. Some have called Billie Eilish the voice of her generation, Generation Z. And while Eilish’s music has become more optimistic, much of her early work dealt with Gen. Z angst, a generation that thinks deeply about climate change and the breakdown of democracy. The lyrics of “hey! hey!” acknowledge the seemingly dire situation of the future, but the youthful optimism of “I’m not afraid until we reach that day that we’ve been waiting for” wins the battle against the melancholy guitar. And with an early summer/late spring release, I think of “hey! hey!” as the Cadillac driver who puts a “Dead Head / Black Flag sticker” on, before he buys the Cadillac, of course. In other words, “hey! hey!” is almost a prequel to “The Boys of Summer.” The only thing missing to make it a true prequel is romance. Only bromance seems to be a theme in this song, and it's not particularly homoerotic; completely platonic, maybe.  I hope that the younger generation doesn’t turn out jaded like every generation before them has, though. Don’t buy that Cadillac. Today’s song is a dose of optimism. Hell, pop-timism. K-pop-timism? 




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