It’s Time To Choose!

I hope you had a great summer! I wrote about one last round of potential Song of the Summer candidates for the Awl, again excluding anything in English.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a teen pop group this large in the U.S.—there are eight members, including one drummer who doesn’t participate in the choreography. Here they swap out leads so quickly and stitch together the vocals so tightly that the singers are still all but indistinguishable by the end; it’s a five-minute song, so that’s 37.5 seconds allotted to each member, if we allow no time for breathing. To keep things under control, they’re sometimes split into two color-coded sub-groups, just like the blue and gold teams from the early-nineties X-Men.

But by all means, continue doing the horsey dance

Over at Spin, we debunk the notion that listening to “Gangnam Style” in any way qualifies as global cultural awareness by pointing you toward “Bloom,” a wonderful new jam that is handily beating Psy on the Korean pop charts.

Korean rapper PSY’s runaway smash-of-smashes “Gangnam Style” has long since graduated to such a level of worldwide Internet saturation that Korean pop listeners have decided it’s time to move on. Son Ga-In is by far his most exciting successor yet; she clearly wants you to have fun, but there are no dances that frat boys will be doing on Halloween, and no shots of anyone rapping on the toilet. more