Review series | My selection - The powerful Korean female RnB vocalists

Part I-b) The powerful female vocalists: BONI | Ailee

I noticed that there are more Korean soul male singers than soul female singers. I wonder why. Or maybe I haven't searched enough. I have a theory: soul music requires sensuality, "exposure" (sort of) of your feelings, as well as mastering one's voice to be tough and powerful on demand. Young Korean women aren't supposed to do that according to society's expectations. The soft, cute, neutral, high pitch voice is what they tend to have massively. They do show sensuality with their bodies but not with their voices.

BONI 보니

Very clear voice, nice rythm and skilled. She's young and her music is old school RnB! I prefer her over Ailee because of her music.

BONI 보니

Korean RnB needs more women with powerful voices like her. Women can be strong in their vocals, but they can be sensual vocally and even sexual. Time will tell. BONI could work on her emotions when she sings, she has the potential for something more than strong vocals.
***

Ailee

Ailee 에일리

Her voice is very RnB, but can be pop as well, she is between somehow. her ease when she sings is remarkable, she's skilled. Like BONI, she needs tp work on using her emotions to move people when she sings.

Honestly, Ailee has a quasi "old-fashioned" Korean sound to me...like her voice is very modern and young, but her music is not fresh enough for my taste, aside from her songle "Heaven", the rest sounds non fresh. Besides, her songs just don't do it to me, unfortunately, it's too pop :(  Great vocalist though!!

***

Honorable mention:

Insooni 인순이

She has such a rich and deep voice. I love her low register. This woman is in her early 50s. Yes. She can SING, dance and captivate an audience. The way she sings is old school, of course, but she has this serene energy that makes her look cool even today. She's too pop sadly, her music is not really RnB.

***
BMK 비엠케이 (here's her wikipedia page)

Don't look at her weight, she's beautiful! Her voice is rich and deep like Insooni's but they sound different. BMK has her own touch and feeling in it. Like Insooni, her music is too pop balladish for my taste, and for this blog post as well. But I had no choice...I have to include them, no woman can outsing them with such power in Korea.

BMK 비엠케이

This is a track from her new mini album.

Kpop and the addition of Western elements

Hello, another article on kpop. It's a fascinating and addictive topic, right? lol

I'm not here to talk about cultural appropriation. I won't talk about race either.

My post is about incorporating Western elements that are not from pop music in kpop. The way they do it, how they benefit from it, and how they manage to have some credibility.

Let's start with the recent buzz with the brand new girlband WASSUP who was announced to "bring twerking to kpop".

Oh-kay...

So, twerking is clearly from hip hop, the Caribbean and Africa...which have nothing to do with massively mainstream pop music. Why not putting this girlgroup in the hip hop or dancehall category? Have you seen Katy Perry twerk? Even Beyoncé doesn't really twerk, she basically shakes her booty and hips but that's it. She's too classy for that ish.
So, this Korean music label is using these dance moves from non pop music to make a buzz in Korea and promote their new kpop girlband. Desperate strategy, that's low. Will Koreans really like it?? Doesn't seem like it. They don't seem to have a concept for this twerking thing, the teaser vids look ratchet or plain, low budget. It's just a copy/paste thing.
Are the girls good at it? One is decent, the others suck.
Why make a buzz about it if your girls can't do it right?? Because some white girl (Miley Cyrus) made it acceptable to twerk awkwardly so Koreans want to do it too (they actually showed her video in their first promotional "interview").

Same thing for hip hop clothes, swag and cliches. Why CL from 2NE1 had to do that, with gangsta-looking dudes in the background à la G-dragon (in One of A Kind)? CL is an idol rapper, which means POP rapper, which means she's from a pop girlband. Really she wants to claim her queen's crown as the baddest female? Isn't this pretentious hip hop-wannabe idol shit right here? Like, she ain't hip hop and she ain't that good but she claims she's the shit in that genre? IT WORKS. Hype is so manipulated. Do you see Yoon Mi Rae wearing these clothes and having an old school hip hop MV, acting all that and repeating how bad she is? Nope but she would have every right to do so. YMR did say a few times (in tracks she was featured) that she's the "illest in town" and that the crown is hers but she actually IS the shit and a hip hop rapper. She doesn't need all that bling bling, cliches and try-hard attitude to look credible.

Another example of pop with hint of hip hop is SNSD's "I Got A Boy". These girls represent kpop and cutesyness. Why oh why would they try (yes, "try") to shake their bottoms and wear hip hop clothes? For hype. Just like when Korean singers cast white models in their MVs, it's for edginess and hype. SNSD sucked at that hip hop thing. Why make a fool of yourself?? Because Korean fans wouldn't know that they suck anyway? They brought the standard lower so fans are not going to expect much.

Korean pop music sacrifices quality for hype, and it has been doing it a lot these days. I can't take kpop fans seriously when they say stuff like "American pop is crappy so now I listen to kpop". Really? Kpop is currently as crappy as American pop. But kpop will soon fully embarass kpop fans so much that they won't say shit like that anymore. Unless they're stans.

What bothers me is the fact that they're taking undeserved hype for something unrelated to them or they didn't work their asses for (because they suck). International kpop fans will love everything they do and say how kpop is the best when it actually keeps borrowing from everywhere. Instead of focusing on themselves, they prefer borrowing what's already successful in the West. What's next? Brazilian funk? Pop rock? Jazz?