I’m not going to review this song because I don’t want to be unnecessarily mean, but listening to rookie group BLINGONE’s re-creation of KARA’s immortal Mister makes for a fascinating case study and comparison between K-pop generations. It answers the question nobody had but everybody wants to know: What if a classic second-gen song had been released today amidst our current musical trends?
The answer is predictably sorrowful. Rather than cast Mister within a series of blazing, high-energy synths, BLINGONE reinvent it with the herky jerky drum-and-bass rhythms currently flooding the market. The song becomes almost unrecognizable, its iconic, triumphant melodies reduced to a series of chirps and squiggles. As the instrumental continues to drop out, the song loses all momentum, making its slower moments drag and faster moments feel hopelessly out of place. It’s disjointed and difficult to dance to, more obsessed with creating three-second highlight clips than fleshing out a full song. And speaking of full songs, the runtime for this new version has been cut by over thirty seconds, which is amazing because BLINGONE’s version feels about ten times as long.
Again, it’s just a fascinating case study.
