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Red Light's Top 20 Female K-pop Songs of 2017 - WINNER


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2017 was truly a dreadful, discouraging year on all fronts: The world (except for Canada, because Canada seems to be the closest civilization we’ll ever see to heaven on earth) is evidently falling apart. The US, on top of its pissing matches with North Korea, has become so clearly divided that it’s too late for peace. Politicians are the most openly evil and corrupt they’ve ever been. The internet has successfully crossed over to the dark side, being used as a tool of war. And, underneath all of that, when GFriend released the best girl group song of the year--and it flopped seemingly against all odds--I knew all hope for K-pop was lost as well.

 

Among its long list of accomplishments, Fingertip is the prime example, in my opinion, of a K-pop group artistically evolving. As terrific as GFriend’s music was before 2017, it was undeniably formulaic and interchangeable. Like I stated at the beginning with EXID, when the formula is that good, it’s far from the worst sin a K-pop artist can commit--but it does take away a certain degree of novelty and, indeed, opens itself up to a very valid criticism. Practically their entire discography prior to Fingertip was one big collection of anime themes; some of them structurally identical to one another (i.e Rough and Navillera). Regardless of that--and maybe even because of that--they were enjoying tremendous success, and had a great burst of momentum going into 2017. If there was any time to try branching out of their girly, nostalgic J-rock-influenced mold, now was the time.

 

So on March 6th, they released a beaconing example of balance between the old and the new. Fingertip has all the makings of an essential GFriend song: Catchy synthpop with vaguely melancholy semitonic melodies and guitar-heavy Power Pop stylings, just like, well, basically everything else they’ve ever released. Yet, just the opposite is true: Fingertip is harder, fiercer, and more mature than any uptempo they’ve ever done.

 

The verses--to put it as simply as possible--go hard as ****, with raw, thundering bass kicks and loose, clamorous snare bashes that leave such a trebley reverb that they sound more like cymbal crashes. The choruses are torturous in that they aren’t big or climactic, but they’re the only sections containing the irresistible hook, blessing the song with an uncanny addictiveness that has kept the song as enjoyable at the end of December as it was at the beginning of March.

 

With squeaky synth leads, lush disco strings, 70’s funk basslines (one of which sounds like some horrifying autotuned snippet from a Donald Duck sex tape), electric guitar licks, and a beat that makes up for its teasingly slow simplicity with merciless heaviness--the track is a darker, more acoustic-driven sibling to KARA’s K-pop classic, STEP. In fact, with the second gen girl groups slowly but surely being replaced (Girls’ Generation by TWICE, 2ne1 by Blackpink, f(x) by Red Velvet), GFriend seemed to be on-lock for taking the torch from KARA. I even checked the producers after I first listened to it to make sure it wasn’t courtesy of Sweetune, whom had a special magic with KARA that’s never really been recreated.

 

And that’s what’s all the more tragic about Fingertip’s flopping: Fingertip was GFriend’s ticket out of the saccharine J-pop mold. It could have been their Lupin--thus paving the way for them to have their own Jumpings, Pandoras, and Damaged Ladies--but South Korea dropped them as randomly and as coldly as they knew how, sending GFriend scrambling for their original sound like a small child running back to its mother after it tries something new. Not that I don’t enjoy Love Whisper (more accurately known as Me Gustas 2) as well--I’m literally incapable of disliking songs with prominent minor seconds--and not to suggest that they don’t have a surprisingly solid discography under their belt, which very often have better album tracks than singles (see #11), but Fingertip hinted at a level of greatness on a completely different plane than the rest of their work.

 

There is one possible positive in all of this: Love Whisper, while certainly doing much better than Fingertip, still didn’t quite draw near the height of successes that they enjoyed in 2016--and Summer Rain, which also has a pretty typical GFriend sound, did even more poorly than Fingertip. If they are just on a permanent downward trend, but still selling well enough to continue working, they could pull a STELLAR: Resigning themselves to their new position on the K-pop totem pole and taking advantage of it; just doing whatever the hell they wanna do. As we step into 2018, my fingers are crossed to the point of fine motor impairment.

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Posted

Fingertip's a masterpiece, great write up :clap3: hope they'll return to that sound one day

Posted

i'll be yours :clap3:and 9muses has 2 songs in top 5 not everyone has that :clap3:

Posted

The only thing Love City has over Hurt Locker is Sojin's breathless chant :gaycat3:

 

Glad you recognised Remember as the slightly superior song though both were incredible so I'd be fine with them going either way. I forgot about I'll Be Yours honestly and while I personally don't consider it anything too spectacular, it was definitely a noteworthy track and LCM was by far the best OEC solo but I also think the breakdowns were a bit forced and don't go that well with the rest of the song making the entire thing a bit of a mixed bag. I definitely preferred Yves' New and the 1/3 stuff.

 

Fingertip :heart2: it was everything I wanted and needed and more, oddly, I ended up liking Love Whisper a little bit better, but this was still an amazing track and I'm super glad it's your #1. Also ppl who say all GFriend songs sound the same are deaf xo.

 

A really fun countdown overall, LOVED your write-ups, they're so detailed, informative and well-written. Did you have any bg songs you liked a lot this year btw?

Posted
11 hours ago, Vilppu said:

The only thing Love City has over Hurt Locker is Sojin's breathless chant :gaycat3:

 

Glad you recognised Remember as the slightly superior song though both were incredible so I'd be fine with them going either way. I forgot about I'll Be Yours honestly and while I personally don't consider it anything too spectacular, it was definitely a noteworthy track and LCM was by far the best OEC solo but I also think the breakdowns were a bit forced and don't go that well with the rest of the song making the entire thing a bit of a mixed bag. I definitely preferred Yves' New and the 1/3 stuff.

 

Fingertip :heart2: it was everything I wanted and needed and more, oddly, I ended up liking Love Whisper a little bit better, but this was still an amazing track and I'm super glad it's your #1. Also ppl who say all GFriend songs sound the same are deaf xo.

 

A really fun countdown overall, LOVED your write-ups, they're so detailed, informative and well-written. Did you have any bg songs you liked a lot this year btw?

Thank you, and not like I did last year. Taemin's stuff was great, as always, but nothing compared to the Press It album imo.

 

I took out the boy group songs from the 2016 list I posted back on page 1, because it didn't fit the female theme, and it also just isn't fair making the boy groups compete with the girl groups on my year-end lists because I have such a hopeless bias for girl groups. :toofunny3: But my 2016 list was actually way more than the 10 songs I posted, and Drip Drop and White Noise both made it into the top 10. They Never Know and Mystery Lover also placed somewhere but I can't remember where. And I didn't hear it until 2017, but if I had heard it when it came out, Lie by BTS is a beautiful song and would have been pretty far up.

 

 This year was just pretty underwhelming all across the board for me. I should have figured the year that I finally managed to join ATRL would be my least favorite year in K-pop. :skull:

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