Lordbordem’s Weekly Ramblings - Not Enough Feel Good in My K-Pop

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Shirokuma Cafe, also called Polar Bear’s Cafe in good olde English. It’s one of those daily life snapshot shows, one that doesn’t have some sort of complex or deep overarching story plot. Instead it tells the tale of a town where talking animals and people live together in relative harmony.

I bring this up because the show has given me two interesting thoughts to dwell on.

1. That AOA sort of reminds me of the seven Penguin sisters in the anime (Maybe it’s because of AOA’s miniskirt album photo?).
2. There is quite a lack of “Feel Good” content in the K-Pop music world.

Obviously can’t discuss both items so lets pick the most important one to ramble on this week.

Very Important Disclaimer Stuff: The writer is not really an expert at anything much and is just a mere casual fan of pretty much everything. The writer has been known to be rather weird and cynical at times. The writer’s opinions certainly DO NOT reflect the opinion of Soompi’s news team or Soompi as a whole. Trust me, the rest of the team is quite normal.

The General Theory Of AOA Penguin-ness 

The theory goes as such: Both AOA and Penguins wear a lot of black and white, they both like the snow, there is seven penguin sisters along with seven AOA members and finally AOA in long padding look like baby emperor penguins. Got all that? Good!  Now moving right along.

Doctor, I Don’t Feel So Good

Moving on to this week’s actual topic. I get this feeling that we don’t have enough “Feel Good” type songs/concepts recently. It’s something I’ve noticed while picking songs out for last week’s Solo Awareness Day article but it really only became something I kept thinking about after watching through a bunch of Polar Bear Cafe episodes. It seems like in the quest to be taken more seriously and to push for ever more elaborate concepts, K-Pop idol songs seem to have moved further and further away from a sense of joy and happiness.

Look at the amount of happy oozing from this!

Looking through the most recent Soompi music charts, the only song I would really consider to be “Feel Good” in any sense would be Rain’s “La Song,” and even that doesn’t really hit that itch all that right. Essentially I wish we would see more songs like J Rabbit’s Happy Things, Kim Kwang Seok’s Where The Wind Blows, G.O.D’s Sky Blue Balloon, Hwang Kyu Young’s I Have No Problems. Essentially I wish there was more songs not about love or strife and more about the general joys of living.

Running at a million miles an hour

It kind of makes you wonder why we don’t get more “Feel Good” songs. Are they just inherently hard to write? Do people have a hard time associating themselves with a sense of constant happiness/positivity or does the whole concept of a “Happy” song get in the way of the industry’s desire for more and more elaborate performances?  Perhaps it’s a personal taste issue as well. Having grown up with a lot of folk songs, the more pronounced vocal styles of genres like R&B and Hip Hop don’t really tend to tickle me fancy.

I still think this was their best song

Personally I think it’s a great time right now for an idol group to come out with a “Feel Good” song. The nation has been hit by several natural disasters and incidents in recent weeks, the Sochi Olympic Team has unfortunately been unlucky in their medal counts despite their great efforts and there is just a general sense of unease and sadness. Groups lately have also been under the radar for employing sexually suggestive marketing techniques and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before the market reacts extremely negatively to any further advances in this regard. 

There has never been a better time for a great little song that was more about the joys and positives of life rather than the constant tales of love and flashiness. Extra bonus points if they go up on stage dressed up as cute little penguins.