Revisited: JOO's Bad Guy

This is the first in a series where I'll re-look at some under-rated recent releases.




Most k-pop observers would recognise end-2010 to early-2011 as the "period of the IU", where the diminutive girl with the anything but small voice dominated the charts.

At around the same time, a less known singer, also about the same age, from JYP Entertainment made her comeback after, in her words "two years of further training".

The EP that she released was quite forgettable, but one song from it stood out to me.

Marketed as a "Standard ballad about a cheating lover", "Bad Guy" had some impact on the charts despite being overshadowed by IU, reaching the top 5 in some weeks.

Composed by E-tribe (who had just come off their lowest period), no instrumentation but simulated ones instead, and a lack of absolute range in her voice, it really should not have worked out.

So how did it end up working out? It was different, and appealed on a different level.

The E-tribe were really brave with this one, to leave behind their trademark "stack as many effects on top of a base tune", and just go with a kick-drum. For once it was good to just do something simpler, and have the listener hear a different side to the "electronic noise experts".

The sparse intrumentation, of a cliched piano intro, and then kick drums with strings for the rest of it, might sound like an odd choice, but it's the bare minimum to pull of a ballad and breaks the mold of ballads being full of orchestral arrangements.

And finally the voice. JOO is not a ballad/singer in the sense of SNSD's Taeyeon or Davichi's Lee Haeri where they can really scale the notes, or display a sense of gentleness to bring out the emotions, but she has a very fine vibrato. She does not scale notes in the absolute sense, but her voices wavers in that fine way to give the song its needed strength and scale, so it is powerful in a relative sense.

The video was also worth a mention, with its novel use of a bubble gun gone rogue. JYP does love their allusions of spurned lovers getting angry  and wreaking havoc.

If you have not listened to this song before, or passed it on in search of other tracks, this is one single worth revisiting.