#Mime is just built different I guess lol

[spittyfishy]

Have you seen the Miraculous Ladybug movie? If yes, what did you think of it?

I have indeed seen it and honestly, I thought it did a better job at telling a concise and clear story then the show has in five seasons lol. The show wastes a lot of time on all the will they won’t they stuff and I was pleased the movie kept that to a minimum.

My main thoughts when I first watched it were as followed:

•the quantity of songs probably could have been cut down slightly since a lot were very similar

•I’m so glad they gave Hawkmoth a villain song it’s very fun (and it’s good they explained his motivation early on)

•Why movie Mime kinda hot tho?

But my absolute favourite part is when they put a magazine cover of Guitar Villain that just has the word prison written all over it and also calls him sexy

Comedy gold right there

[kidnamedfinger]

Hi! Me again! So, part of it is how Kpop "vocal soup" is done, and how they're trained! Sms a little bit of an outlier in the sense like all the big 4 they tend to have one or two "special" tones per group-but even then those are kind of interchangable u less you're a fan or have a good ear. I hope it becomes more clear what I mean and I only used groups I'm a fan of so hopefully it comes across as respectful but clinical lol. NCT in general has strong vocalists but the same principle still applies and my biggest !! In that not really mattering is how SM has most of the boys separated when they're recording/how many cuts there are in the BTS videos showing that they're still being coached/guided on camera not really off the cuff bc sm/Kpop, and who gets what lines. I just watched the universe recordings and I think it's a good example. My English also sucks and this is super long lmao!

Kpop runs off "vocal soup". Tara's CEO,brave brothers, and the guy who did shinees earlier work have all used the term at some point (I'm only 23 but Ive been here for a while lol) and I think you can still find proof of it when you go through old blog forums. Vocal soup is the idea of keeping tones generally indistinguishable from each other so you can swap vocalists out/ghost vocal. Like obviously if you know let's say 127 for example you can hear the difference between Jungwoo and Haechan and even Doyoung. But if you weren't a fan and compared Xiumin and Suho from exo it'd be REALLY easy for sm to "vocal soup" them-and I'm almost sure like in every group they have. A good example of that in NCT is probably the rappers and the mid range/high range vocalists like Jaemin/Jeno,Kun/Ten. Exos a good concrete example of that at the top of my head but this is for every group. You can hear that Chen and Kyungsoo have really different tones from each other, but if you put Kyungsoo and Baekhyun together or Xiumin, the difference is in how high they get, or Sehun/Kai-theres a difference in overall range and fans can spot the difference because we're so indindated with songs but the GP/casual listeners aren't. And in the studio it's common to "vocal soup" and mix those voices together-their actual tones aren't all that different. Each singer follows an archetype-Jonghyun/Chen/Taeil/Haechan maybe goes here? , Winter/Taeyeon/Wendy ect. It's why shows like that guess where x singer is behind the door! Out of six ppl with similar voices is even capable of happening-the actual vocal tone is trained (and why in other countries for the most part-its omg who could this voice be*I'm speaking in generalities a little). It's why it's such a big deal when they have singers with *special voices*. Taeil might have the higher pop vocal range sm loves but they can't train out Haechans tone-and to a lesser extent Jungwoo,thats why they're always getting similar sort of parts in song structures. It's why YG has a Bom/Rose archetype in each of his girl groups. I'm positive that the new yggg will follow the same pattern of one very unique voice and singing style-Bom sings everything stacatto which Kpop fans call bad singing lol, And rose is purposely breathy even when she belts. SNSD is also a good example-in the chorus all the girls are supposedly singing-but Jessica barley ever actually had chorus linea-its usually Seohyun because she has the Sm bright voice sound-and whoever else. But they'd make all the girls mime out-and vocal later it to make it sound more full. Like idk if you know who Girls Day is or Secret of 4minute. Take their lead and main vocals, just from group to group-and the tones are virtually indistinguishable. Kpop groups are purposely built that way-and the big thing that differentiates kpop choruses is usually how many vocals they have layered into the chorus-but that sound of how many people you think you can hear-might not actually be happening at all.

Usually-and what I think is also happening to Nct-is that they generally have an idea of who's gonna sing what a couple years into their debut,maybe even as early on as the first 2 or 3 cbs/repeating song structure. Jungwoo/Haechan/Jessica/Sunny/Rose are usually always gonna get the "emphasize" parts of songs-the prechorus/bridge/adlibs usually versus the main verse just because of their tones-same sort of thing for rappers in non heavy rap groups (where it's reversed). But the first couple years a kpop group is placed together they have everyone run through the whole song regardless of vocal ability, or all the rappers try the raps parts (but rappers also sing so they probably get both-and depending on the grouo-the rappers ARE the special voices/"umph"-or just other Archetypes that can be switched out from one a other. Jarmin raps like yangyang raps like Jeno raps like hendery ect) and all the vocalists try the vocal parts. And then the producers cut and paste who does what. As it becomes more clear and with guidance from the CEO/directors usually the producers tend to have a template for who does what-and part of that is also following the direction of we need so and so to have more lines so they get more screentime/build in a dance break for the dancers please/rappers need lines if it's not a rap group ect ect. Everything is super decided-theres no way it's as lazze faire as sm has it in those videos, everything is being cut and pasted and probably reworked AGAIN after whoever it is approves it. And that's not the producers, at Sm it's directly lsm and his board for every come back.

(And it's not just kpop that does this-pop singers get vocal souped a lot, a lot of the famous pop girls and indie pop singers are being either ghost vocaled (jlos whole career lol) or vocal souped by unnamed singers/producers mastering and remixing the demos into their songs so it's a more standard pop voice).

They have the NCT boys separated when they're recording because it takes HOURS to record even simple small parts usually, the videos arent just short, they're SUUUUPER condensed. Its most likely the 3-4th time any of them are ever hearing the song-if sm/whatever company is even showing the group the song before the studio-and just because they're being directed to record it doesn't mean it's going to be released. Mark alluded to having recorded child ages ago-and other songs too. As if it's your last was a 2ne1 song that's on camera being played out of YG years ago-and bp had a recording of it from debut but didn't release it until later. When sm is doing the BTS videos they're leaving out the parts that weren't chosen, like in my guess probably making Haechan and Jungwoo sing the same lines over and over and then having whoever wasn't chosen for x come back and record-or most likely making the boys sing every part they can and then when the producers have decided this person goes here here and here-getting them to come back and either reshoot for sms camera(cynical interpretation) or coming back and redoing lines that they were chosen for/switched, they can easily just play Haechan listening to Jungwoos parts because they probably have Jungwoo singing every feasible part they could think of. (This isn't to you but to loop fans in general, Ive seen people be mean to Aespa lol, All of those BTS videos are still Sm edited, and ultimately fanservice/pr).

A big reason for the vocal soup technique is because if someone's voice stands out-not just in their group but in general-its harder to replace. I like skz but that one dude leaving is a good example as to why-nothing really changed in their sound with him gone. All they had to do was make their vocalists go in their upper range, and they can recreate the tone almost exactly. Even kpop rappers tend to have the same tone. And I'm only saying kpop bc we're talking Abt nçt but the same thing works for western music-theres a very "bright" sort of tone for female sopranos in musicals-and they're taught to sing a certain way with their vowels ect. You don't really WANT a super unique vocal tone because you're onstage acting out a role-and hopefully get other roles-even if youre a technically skilled singer it won't matter if your voice detracts from the production. Most pop singers if they're female are mezzo sopranos-the most common female vocal range, and they're taught to enunciate and sing a certain way by genre. A RnB is her depending on the decade is going to enunciate differently in the 90s to now. A non poo example is probably paramore-Hayley has a soprano voice which is VERY high but she usually sings her lower notes in the chorus bc that's more accessible/more of that early rock sound they were going for-and she purposely enunciates a certain way to get her voice to break because it's rock music. It's not the Os and As like Beyonce/Adele, it's her Cs and Hs where she usually purposely causes a voice break-or on the pop rock end why all those dudes like the Wonder Years/Bowling for Soup even years apart all have the same vocal affect. It's how theyre forming the words and probably on some level trained their voices to mimic those tones.

Tldr: Pop vocal soup!!!!

omg thank you so much for returning and telling me all of this! its kind of breaking my mind haha

i have 2 thoughts mainly coming from this, the first is that i NEVER would have guessed how ... relevant? jungwoo actually is in the production process. i never rly found jungwoos tone remarkable i thought he was just naturally breathy/he reminded me of xiumin in that sense. which i agree i am suho biased but he and xiumin were very similar to me too when i was getting into exo and he just simply isn't top 3 vocalists in exo even though he isnt bad. i wonder if this is connected to how yeri doesn't get a lot of individual lines/is relegated to the rap parts but does a lot of the hidden/grounding vocal parts?

forgot my 2nd thought lol im still a lil high but another thought that comes is that dichotomy between unique and non unique tones. i first noticed this with seulgi (unique) and wendy (non unique), i concede wendy is prob better technically but seulgis voice has more character (and i didnt use to like her voice at first). id never heard of the vocal soup thing but it makes so much sense, especially when sometimes it is a better biz decision to cram a bunch of randoms/mediocre singers in a group as opposed to cutting a lot of ppl

so basically im feeling like this means sm/kpop (sm being the frontier of modern kpop in so many ways) is MORE processed than we all thought it was. i wondered how it could be possible/effective for companies to micromanage comebacks so deeply as they do, when often they will end up getting criticized on the same minute level. i guess sm/etc. see a profit incentive to accept it when some of their decisions are poorly received. there are some things abt the kpop life that we will never know but again its the same with hollywood and the us music industry etc. etc.

[eternaleve]

I’ve spent the course of COVID lockdown cycling through hyperfixations while also trying to engage in some much needed therapy (lolsob), and I’ve been essentially encouraging myself to try and do more things I can enjoy without feeling shame. Anyway, that’s a short way of saying I decided to blog about all the music videos of Depeche Mode for reasons of science.

The science is that my basic premise is that most of the videos are pretty bad in ways that I find to be pretty strange. Full disclosure is that I spent my teen years being a huge Cure fan and there’s an overlap there? Of songs with very niche high-concept ideas that don’t necessarily map onto a model of popular music but found mainstream success in the rise of new wave music in the wake of the collapse of first wave punk and amplified by the creation of music videos and music video TV. And I owned all the Cure music videos and played them on my iPod Nano because I was a very strange child. But to get back to my central thesis, many of The Cure’s videos are very stylised and fun and memorable in ways that are good. And yet, despite existing in the same sphere and having an overlap of fans, the music videos for Depeche Mode mostly stay bad until the end of the eighties, a fact I will prove by watching them all.

Can you tell that I am bored because i have lost my job and my mental health is making me fixate on strange shit currently because that is absolutely the case right now

Speak & Spell

Dreaming of Me (Feb 1981)

The single art is really lovely - the red/yellow contrast is very striking against the white, and I really love the design. Hey remember when people used to go out and buy singles and you would appreciate them and the work that went into them? I don’t think I’ve bought a physical single since I was about sixteen. I used to buy them from the Woolworths music department because it was cheap and all my friends worked there, so they had a pretty lenient attitude about what exactly constituted paying for things. Woolworths policy of only hiring teenagers is probably what destroyed their business.

Anyway, Dreaming of Me did not chart super well, getting to number 57 and having no official music video - or actually getting onto the album. It wasn’t included on Speak & Spell in the UK until the 2006 re-release. So, there was no music video for me to look at…

Apart from this video I found from local TV in 1981 to promote the song. It’s a maybe-music video. Because music videos had only been around for about six years and MTV didn’t exist until later in the same year, my guess is that Mute Records were pretty cautious about putting money into a medium that might cost more than they would get in publicity. That’s only a guess. I don’t have a crystal ball for forty years ago. 

Anyway, here are some children recording music.

If i was 19 and someone offered me a recording contract I would have taken it without thinking (like i took on all those student loans without thinking through any consequences wompwomp) but now I am nearly thirty I watch this and think, ‘These children shouldn’t be outside unaccompanied’. The passage of time has made a fool of me.

They go bowling and play Space Invaders which, hey, still sounds like a great night out to me, but I’m guessing that because this is very clearly aimed at teenagers the TV producers didn’t want to encourage teen drinking by showing them performing a gig at a club night.

I call it high fashion. The all-grey really sells it.

This reminds me so much of a advice column in teen magazines - when they’d have problems set out in a little faux-comic strip of still photos? ‘My best friend stole and read my diary’ ‘My crush found out about how I feel and now he’s going out with my best friend’, that sort of thing. That is also a classic carpet pattern. I think my grandma’s living room had that carpet. 

The video is very naive! It’s the sort of thing we would all see now on Youtube from bands just starting out and it is wild to me that this went out on TV. It’s very un-glossy and normal, the stuff that bands put out on YouTube now because of DIYness.

New Life (June 1981)

This is also a really great piece of single art. It’s very bold and striking - it would definitely be the standout record in a sea of other 7’’ released the same week. It also doesn’t particularly match the tone of the single but eh, it looks pretty cool. New Life did much better than Dreaming of Me and got up to number 11 in the UK singles chart. Still no official music video, but the charting meant that the band got onto Top of The Pops! ToTP was cancelled when I was a wee baby teen, because the BBC decided to stop caring about yoof viewership and promoting music was circling the drain everywhere as streaming hit, but it was the place to promote music so was definitely a sign that You Had Made It.

So, last video was silly and made by children, but now they’re wearing see-through mesh shirts, leather trousers, and leather hats with a design that I am a little bit dubious about. I grew up on the oi/punk scene and let me tell you about how many first wave punks wear iconography of bad regimes for faux edginess reasons because I met a LOT of them in my time.

Oh boy do i have thoughts about that hat. It also looks like a Leather Daddy hat which, well, let’s leave that thought to one side. Most ToTP performances were lipsynced. Playing things live would sound weird in the studio, be picked up strangely by the audio equipment and the cameras, so 99% of performances were mimed to the single. Now, some acts would deliberately play up to the pretence and refuse to act like they were doing anything that corresponded to the song - The Jam, The Communards, and The Cure are literally the first examples that come to mind who would just… not do anything close to pretending it was real. 

This is not that. It is very earnest and awkward and serious, which sort of makes it very sweet.

Just Can’t Get Enough (September 1981)

Right, that is shibari, isn’t it? I’m not blind, am I? It’s a very striking image that 99.9% of people would not recognise other than being a striking black and white image. 

I don’t think I can overstate how… innocent, in a way, this point of time was? As in the general level of knowledge about non-conventional stuff in the wider public at large. As in my mother, an almost teen at this point, saw George Michael walking with his boyfriend in central London and had no idea he was gay until he came out. It’s actually the widest cultural gulf I can think of between her teen years and my teen years because I was very aware of queer people from a young age.

Anyway, moving on, I feel like it bears repeating that this song fucking slaps. It’s the last single to be written by Vince Clarke and the last single until 2006 to be written by someone other than Martin Gore. This is one of those songs that just works on every level. Can you imagine coming up with this for the first album of your band? That blows my mind. It’s so overpoweringly good that it was probably for the best that it was saved for last - coming out the gate with a guaranteed fucking banger was been the nail in the coffin for a lot of other eighties synth/electronica bands. They scored a huge hit and then nothing after that managed to be as good or meet the hype. Depeche Mode had built up a far bit of radio play and interest before dropping this which turned out to be very good in the long run!

This got to number 8 on the UK charts and the first to get a music video! It is the only one with Vince Clarke. Full disclosure in that I had this song on my iPod through downloading the video to my computer (that’s how we got songs without using stuff that would give us viruses because i got a ton using bearshare for rare cure demos) and I remember watching the video, all of sixteen years old, and thinking, ‘Man, all these people look so grown up, compared to me, I can’t wait to be an adult!’.

Twelve years have changed my view, somewhat.

Look at this little baby man. Were you in one of my A Level classes - as in, ones that I have taught, not ones that I have been in.

Vince Clarke, however, has had a significant glow up in the six months and now looks like he is the bouncer in a leather bar. This is the One Adult in the room.

Ahh, I see it’s Open Mic Night at the local leather bar. You know what I was saying about how teens in the eighties tended to be significantly more naive about what we might call certain signifiers? Because what this outfit says to me, a queer woman in 2020, is susbstanitally different than to my mum and her friends watching this when it first came out. She would read this as ‘This is totally rebellious and cool!’ while I go ‘Someone just joined the university kink club and spent all their bursary’.

I don’t remember the member of Blazin’ Squad that wore a slave harness. (Now, there’s a reference that shows my age. A Blazin’ Squad reference in the year of Our Lord 2020. Hoooo boy.)

I read somewhere (that I can’t find now because, of course I can’t) that these are the band’s girlfriends and I always remembered that because it made me think, lol, same. One of my closest friends is the Head of London, so she’s in every band in London and if she’s not in yours yet give her time, and my partner was in a locally successful metal/hardcore band for about a decade and being connected with any sort of band means you will be helping out hugely behind the scene constantly. I have held lights, moved speakers, picked up instruments, been in music videos, and have bought tearaway trousers and glowsticks for gigs. You get called in to help all the time which is a lot of fun, so that fact always just stuck with me. It also makes sense financially because then you don’t have to hire any professional backing dancers, you can rely on people who will happily do it for free (while looking pretty rad while doing it!).

Anyway, the band look like those generic raiders that you run into when randomly walking across the map in a Fallout game.

I love awkward choreography in music videos. It feeds me.

Filming a night out provides A) Great footage and B) Can be done for limited overheads, leaving more money to be put into promotion. 

I always like seeing this sort of footage in music videos. I tend to see a lot of it, given the DIY punk scene, and it always charms me. I am easy to please. And all those women have the most amazing eye makeup that makes me super jealous because it all looks so good.

That hat is on point. This looks like a still image for some sort of cyberpunk big band style swing revival that, sadly, lives only in my dreams.

It took me so goddamn long to screenshot this shot probably because i was also blasting dream nails whoops

Anyway those are my reactions to Speak & Spell’s one solitary music video with some other things thrown in and this took me way too long. I make myself laugh though, that’s the main thing. I will do A Broken Frame… at some point. I think I have a bunch of vinyl for A Broken Frame? My mum actually bought all the singles for that album and I stole most of her collection years ago. I will have to search and see what I can find.