Let me preface this post with an admission: I will rarely turn down a good intellectual exercise. More importantly, I will certainly not turn down a useless intellectual exercise that involves writing a stupidly long essay with too many tangents. So here we are. Please humor me and my tangents for now.
In addition to thoroughly enjoying unneeded mental workouts with a non-zero chance of ending up with carpal tunnel syndrome, I’m also of the opinion that the best way to start an intellectual exercise is to spend unnecessary extra time exploring why it came to be in the first place. This story begins with a normally entertaining group chat and my complaints about the way “people” (i.e., netizens) were discussing live vocals in K-pop was annoying. This led to the expressing of my disappointment in the way many K-pop performances are both live and uninspired (naturally, because of course I would).
In response to this frankly un-called for rant, one friend (—am I afforded the privilege of calling them, friend? I hope so—) shocked me with the astute question, “…what are your favorite vocal moments in K-pop?”
Why do I think this seemingly simple question is particularly astute? Because saying something is mediocre is a waste of time if you don’t establish the context. “Mediocre” is a relative term. It has no value unless you define what the extremes might be. The bad extreme is something most can agree on. High quality in the world of vocals is where people begin to argue and things get interesting. Not to mention that no one ever likes a Negative Nancy.
So here I am, detailing one version of an answer to that big ask. Let’s first start with the implied question: what are the qualities that make a vocal moment “good?” Is it a famous part of a song? Is it a technical skill? Is it something that feels impressive because of a certain feature (e.g. “the high note”)? Is it the climatic point where the fireworks go off on stage? As is tradition around here, it’s a lot more fun to say it is all of those things and none of those things and attempt to parse together the why.
The way that I want to address the spectrum of “good vocals” begins with yet another story. When I initially was presented with the aforementioned pressing question, an incomplete blog post of mine immediately came to mind. I was evidently a very ambitious person back in December of 2018, and I really wanted to talk about the year’s music a little differently from the usual list of year-end favorites. My solution to making things fresh and more authentic to how I enjoy music was not to talk about favorite songs, but to talk about favorite parts of songs.
This process allowed me to accomplish two things. The first was to allow me to really think about why I enjoyed the songs I did and attempt to explain that reasoning. The second was to help me reevaluate songs I thought I didn’t like and find positive aspects. Both of these vantage points helped me become a more active listener than before, and active listening in turn enhanced my experience of music.
I quickly discovered that what I believed to be successful sections of K-pop tracks often overlapped with what I would identify to my favorite vocal moments. Vocal performance and song quality goes hand in hand for me; many times I go from being a passive party to an invested fan because the vocalist(s) did something make a melodic line stand out. A big part of this also involves internalizing that musicality is not a concrete entity. It’s not a binary of presence or absence. It can change from verse to verse. Different singers can have different interpretations of the same section and have an equal musicality.
Let’s take Exo’s “Runaway,” for example. I can pretty safely say that it’s one of the better vocal performances from a male K-pop group out there. Nevertheless there are plenty of pop music critics, be it from a living room armchair or on payroll, that don’t find this song interesting—ones I’m even happy to call friends. I don’t disagree with their point of view. The hook is particularly tired. But you do know what’s really going for it? The first 40 seconds. Kyungsoo’s outro. Baekhyun’s bridge. The best of Exo’s R&B interpretive skills are impressive and “Runaway” is a decent example of it. The depth of that interpretation starts from Kai’s opening bars. The vocals are pulsing, urgent, and carry an overarching chill much like the synth line and the concept of the song.
“잠깐, 잠깐, 우린 지금 잠시, 환기가 필요해, 무조건 버티는 게답은 아닐 테니, no…no, no, no.”
There’s a stillness and assertion to each “잠깐 (wait),” as if it were some musical brake, followed by the enunciation of “잠” in “잠시” and “피” in “필요해,” with a mini crescendo-decrescendo within the word. Then at the end of the section you get the musical equivalent of a sigh with the runs for the “no”s. It’s important to realize in all of this nit-picky breakdown that Kai is not some incredibly gifted technical singer, he just knows his voice and timbre, and he has musical sensibility. I’m not judging his ability to accurately hit runs.
With Kyungsoo and Baekhyun you hear the comfort, confidence, and maturity of seasoned vocalists. With Baekhyun’s prechorus, we can really highlight that contrast of maturity by listening to Xiumin, who executes the parallel melody with a little less finesse. Baekhyun adds a glissando with “비친,” and swings the “머릿속을” while Xiumin leaves these melodies plain. On the other hand, Kyungsoo takes a warmer, slurred route and comes out just as successful as Kai in the opening verse.
Placing character in the details establishes personal musicality. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to sing lines spelled out on paper. The talent comes when one has technical strength to focus on interpreting melodies instead of merely regurgitating the composer. A lot of people think that this means vocal gymnastics like the great stuff we hear at the bridge and outro of “Runaway.” (So-called ad-libs are not often ad-libed, by the way!) As amazing and as elegant as these ad-libs are, I’m really referring to the nuances I just discussed with regards to the verses of “Runaway.” Where you decide to emphasize syllables, drag or push phrases, slide notes, or shape the dynamics develops the hue of whatever base color exists within the melody.
Maybe now you’re thinking that I’m just obsessed with the vocal quirks of R&B which lend itself to some of these manipulations or that I’m just being an Exo vocal-line stan, which fine, I admit I sort of am. So let’s look at a broader application of this concept. Sometimes a vocal performance makes or breaks a song. (G)I-DLE’s “Hwaa (火)” is a great example of this. The song is entirely powered by Soyeon’s opening verse. It not only acts like a vocal conch shell, which certainly thematically helps the track, it also gives lift to all the other parts that might be underperformed. Even Yuqi, who has a deep and dark timbre well suited for something like “Hwaa,” is a little dull. The most disappointing part is the “Hwaa” hook, which sounded copy-pasted from beginning to end even though it carries an entire melodic phrase. It’s literally supposed to be a fire! It’s snap and crackle and anger! Where did it go?
So what does Soyeon do exactly to set my expectations so high? Much like Kai, she’s not an exactly a main vocalist. But as a composer of “Hwaa,” she does understand the cadences the song is going after.
Here’s her opening verse:
Yeah 차디찬 한겨울이 덮친 듯 Yeah
시간은 다 얼어버리고
잔인한 그 바람이 남긴 듯한
어둠은 더 깊어 버리고
As if in the dead of winter
The time has completely frozen
Which seems to be left by the cruel wind
The darkness deepens
So by the lyrics of the first verse she’s going for the imagery of cold winter and sense of isolation, but also the anticipation of something to be found, the titular fire. She literally melodically suspends “얼어버리고.” and so you have both an auditory and lyrical sensation of stoppage—i.e. “freezing.”
But you don’t need to understand the words, that’s just a fun bonus. There’s a sense of drama inherent to the melody that exists beyond any attached lyric. Soyeon is merely developing that drama further with her interpretation of the melody. Sharp attacks and releases build anticipation (and are mimicked by the synths!). The ringing and subtle vibrato of the phrase-ends are bellwethers for the fire to come. It’s not just Soyeon’s dark voice that drives this. She put in effort!
That’s why I was utterly flummoxed to find that the vocalists of the groups relied so heavily on their timbre for the rest of the song. It’s why I couldn’t understand how the soulless the “Hwaa” melodies were when they had the chance to make it a focal point of the track instead of a dead embellishment. Despite all of this, because we had such a powerful beginning the small hits the rest of the song took are easily overlooked. “Hwaa” as a whole is one of my favorite melodic K-pop moments from this year. I’m honestly being a little harsh on the likes of Minnie and Miyeon with this commentary given that their performances were overall good. I’m just harping on the line between good and great here. That said, if I’m to be really honest, this distinction is not a blip in their repertoire but a pattern.
Even though I just covered two songs in this first part, I hope we now we have a sense of what I hear and look for. I hope that this also gives clarity to my frustration with live music show performances and people using “live” recordings versus “clean” pre-recordings to decide whether idols can sing or not. I promise you, you don’t need it. How people sing is what matters. If you sing live and I’m bored or annoyed, what was the point? The pre-recording can’t create musicality where it doesn’t exist. There are only two things that bother me with pre-recorded lives and they are, one, the dissection of the music from the choreography, and two, a sense of boredom when the same exact pre-recording gets re-used. I guess the there is a third frustration too—but that has less to do with the recording itself and more to do with the disingenuous feeling that comes with the show of mics when they don’t do anything meaningful.
Keep in mind though that what I find melodically interesting is of course a matter of taste, but knowing that someone has the talent to craft and execute a meaningful interpretation is a huge signpost for being a good vocalist. There’s a clear difference between Luna from 0:30-0:40 of “Free Somebody” and Lia and Ryujin during the bridge of Itzy‘s “Mafia: In the Morning” or Lia and Chaeryeong in the second pre-chorus of the same song. Luna’s vocal talent shines, albeit with subtlety.
In Part II I plan to get in the fun details of a handful of what I find to be great vocal moments in K-pop (with some I’m banking on being surprising) and I hope that this initial analysis gives a foundation for what will be the core of that discussion. I’d also love to hear (on whatever platform) what anybody who takes the time to read this post thinks—was everything I said total hogwash, did it leave you merely amused, or did I manage the impossible and change how you see certain songs?
Images belong to respective owners like Cube Enterntainment, JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment
A Splash of Inspiration 