Ввожу новую рубрику.
Профессиональные и не очень музыкальные критики-блогеры СЛОУПОЧНО на полном серьезе оценивают комментируют платиновые к-поп песни. Почти как сток, только не для инфантилов.
Регулярность выхода, по мере появления, примерно один в неделю. Оценки по десятибальной шкале.
Последние два.

BTS – Dope [5.09]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVwAVbKYYeM

Примечание, что такое GDFR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8Cg572dafQ

Katherine St Asaph: GDFR: God Damn Fucking Retreads.
[3]

Madeleine Lee: It’s not as “GDFR” as UNIQ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96THVBRqJvY since the more popular you get, the less derivative you have to be, but it’s not original enough to overcome the comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3rVim3sxTQ It’s more staid than “Fun Boys”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCCqT2hmPIg but it compensates with a stronger chorus and funny career-drag costumes, so that’s fine. It got to “jjeoreo” (https://goo.gl/kpwFqb Korean slang: What does it mean by 쩔어?) faster than GD&T.O.P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8t8A8E_Tqc did, as expected of a group with their ears closer to the ground than to the top floor of the YG building, but T.O.P saying “Francis Bacon in my kitchen” is brilliant, and Rap Monster’s yukpo joke (http://goo.gl/on7u8y Do you know what rapmon is talking about in his part in 쩔어? With the numbers? I don't get it) is belaboured. Basically, it doesn’t go far enough one way or the other. I will readily agree that BTS are dope, but “Dope” is not as inventive, or cool, or even as unlistenable and cheesy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUPB64oQWYI as I know they can be.
[6]

Jessica Doyle: So the song is an homage to working hard. The video (yeah, you need the video, the song doesn’t do much on its own) throws in: cosplay; Rap Monster as ringmaster and occasional tempo controller; J-Hope being 140 percent limbs; Jungkook making big eyes at the camera; various random kicks and finger-guns; Jimin beginning to strip; more cosplay; all of them running madly in one direction for no good reason. In other words, it is BTS 101. It is not the quickest way to convert an innocent bystander from mild amusement to all-caps despair (that’s this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70SMjxn4FBA ), but should you ever end up trapped in an elevator with the despairing, this will help you understand what afflicts them.
[5]

Jonathan Bradley: Do sax whines justify unearned swagger any better? No, but since when should swagger be earned?
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: BTS’s The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. 1 is one of my favorite records of the year — but this is my least favorite track on it, largely because it goes hard for an EDM-pop sound. Larded with that ultra-fake EDM sax and a bunch of needless builds and drops, this goes nowhere.
[4]

Patrick St. Michel: The janky sax can be forgiven, as “Dope” is as tightly constructed as any big-time K-Pop number. Yet it’s sorta weird listening to a song glorifying the intense work conditions of the industry, and tough to get pumped to lyrics such as “even if our youth rots in the studio/thanks to that, we’re closer to success.” Like, congrats on your dance moves and “hustle life,” but it still feels like I’m listening to a future labor case.
[5]

David Sheffieck: The attitude and propulsion of the verses is plenty compelling, particularly with the limber way the production shifts for each and the way each vocalist builds precisely to the pre-chorus. But can we please just throw that saxophone sound down a deep well and collectively agree to never speak of it again?
[5]

Alfred Soto: “I Need You” was such a sumptuous bump ‘n’ grind that I knew it was a fluke, and the wannabe hard rapping on “Dope” is as gauche as the horn hook.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Hair-metal conviction with EDM dynamics, and less fun than that sounds. I do like the sax sample being tortured to death.
[4]

Moses Kim: I’m not sitting in the dining hall at 1am on a Sunday evening because I didn’t try hard enough. I had work on Saturday morning, then a friend dropped by on Saturday afternoon, and then a truly wicked headache hit me and I had to lie down for several (ten) hours. College is scary, the constant pressure to measure up and temptation to dress down hitting like a one-two punch, but this world isn’t new to me. Like many Korean high school kids, some of whom today have “Dope” as their morning alarm or their ringtone or their running playlist opener, I grew up surrounded by adults and media figures telling me the only thing that gave me worth was my work, grew up seeing a lot of my friends losing their ideals or their self-confidence or both. On one level, BTS is operating on this boilerplate premise of work as a tangible, but on another they’re reframing it. It’s a song where work ethic is connected to the flourishing of an inner self rather than its loss, the beginnings of empowerment rather than its end: “I’ll do this differently from the other guys, [it’s] my style,” Jungkook asserts in the first eight bars, while rapper SUGA raps about watching his “youth rot away” like he’s waiting for something else to grow out of that fertilized ground. It’s a club song that shits on people who go clubbing, the pre-chorus boasting of “working all night every day” while you were busy partying it up, and that “Thrift Shop” riff may be cheap, but it’s celebratory nonetheless, the fruit of hard labor. Sure, “Dope” is accusatory and a little over-sincere and more than a little in poor taste given what job prospects look like in Seoul right now (http://goo.gl/hV1Exd Youth unemployment rate in Korea reaches highest in 15 years). But fuck measuring success in jobs, fuck the adults who hold them above kids’ heads while judging them for jumping too low, and fuck anybody who thinks they can take your work and all that it means away from you. This was written for us, not them. Feel free to dance.
[7]

Brad Shoup: [flo rida voice] IT’S GOIN’ DOWN FOR FUNSIES
[5]

Stellar – Vibrato [6.62]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOmTdFpIDX8

Sonya Nicholson: With Stellar there’s always the moral dilemma of supporting a group whose company have been actively marketing them as “good girls who didn’t want to” do all this sexual stuff, but “we” made them because it sells. (And who is “we”? Company, industry, fans, even casual listeners, all complicit.) “Vibrato” brings a new twist, however, which is that in the end… Stellar are into it too! Surprising even themselves. Is it the truth? Who knows, but I’d certainly like that fig leaf. “Vibrato” is the complete K-pop package, from image (as discussed), to music (very good, especially the shift after the tempo change), to video (sleazy, sexy, goofy, self-aware, and arousing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY0SSapdiG4 by turns). It’s the sync between the parts as much as the individual parts that are selling me on this thing.
[9]

Patrick St. Michel: I mean…I get why the video has attracted the bulk of attention over the last couple months, but I also think it has something to do with how nondescript the actual song is. A summery disco number out of Korea about first love — it sounds nice, but I’ve also heard this a bunch of times before in much better guises.
[5]

Brad Shoup: The vocal heights they hit are like an alarm sounding; they snap you to attention. Not that everything else is an afterthought: that switch from half-speed electropop to the frantic funk is incredible. It’s just that the vocals — which only stop when the track does — give this more now-ness than any other disco-funk tune in a long while.
[8]

Maxwell Cavaseno: The tempo change is a good trick, but honestly this disco track seems a bit too stressed and K-Pop once again proves their adoration of saxophones in arrangements can lead to some real hit or miss work.
[4]

Thomas Inskeep: Pleasingly perky K-pop with a nice tempo-change breakdown. It’s unexceptional, but it works.
[5]

Moses Kim: On “Marionette”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCQpzHPYRUc they were dull-eyed playthings, pushed to and fro by a cruel love interest in the song and scorned and fetishized in equal measure by the Korean viewing public. “Look at me,” its chorus declared in quiet desperation, refusing to let its audience disengage even when what it was seeing was ugly. “Vibrato” is a sonic step beyond anything that precedes it in Stellar’s discography: its rhythms more elastic; its instrumentation more lush (no small credit to Sweetune’s subtly textured production, which lets each motif recede before bringing it back into sharp, throbbing focus). Yet for all the bounce in its step, the song unfurls as an exercise in vulnerability, “a flower that’s blossomed in the ice” giving way first to an “aura melting bit by bit” and then the “trembling” that translates into “Vibrato” in English, unwilling feelings of desire for a lover or an audience spun into sharp delivery, calculated technique. As the song delves more into the emotional helplessness of it all, it throws more and more at us until we hit that accelerated climax, packed with instruments and breathy ad-libs: I got trapped, got trapped, but so did you, you who stuck around this long to see what was going to come next. There’s also the video, which frames the quartet in an endless hallway full of mirrors, and the real-life controversy of them fighting their agency for the right to wear less-revealing clothing (http://goo.gl/E2D9jM Stellar had to fight management to wear less revealing underwear in "Vibrato" MV), but the song is its own artifact, a glimmering diamond of a tune with deceptively sharp edges.
[9]

Jessica Doyle: A different group might have powered through on “Marionette”; Stellar didn’t have the energy to keep the song from getting sodden. “Vibrato” compensates by quickening the pace, adding a careful dash of strings, and creating a nicely propulsive chorus. Whether or not that’s enough to overcome the layer of exploitative grime (http://goo.gl/vnhKbu Stellar says their company suggested them to dance in thongs) covering the whole operation is a matter of personal judgment. I will note that the members don’t look much happier or more comfortable doing the “pure cute” version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMAOiBwhPds. Also that this footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyx8LIHpn4Q exists, though it doesn’t seem to have been subbed yet.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Disco strings like ribbons of knives, romantic desire as something both overwhelming and slightly horrifying, machine-tooled dance that both catches you up in the rapture and beats you into submission; this is a very good song about emotions that are often presented as wholly uncomplicated in pop. More death disco, please.
[8]

Прямо мысли читают. Чего думаете, надо нет? Текста не много?

Red Velvet – Dumb Dumb [5.78]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGdbaEDVWp0
Тут даже сам немного бомбанул.

Iain Mew: “Dumb dumb dumb dumb” rhymes with “Rum Pum Pum Pum” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnku4o3tRB4 and it’s very much the equivalent — ebullient, confident, naggingly catchy, and barely a hint at the heights of the accompanying album.
[7]

Maxwell Cavaseno: I just don’t know; the brashy speed-run soul embellishments on the verses remind me of the worst parts of “Problem,” the chorus with its almost Andrews Sisters-like earworm has some staying power, but then we end up with that ABYSMAL Michael Jackson-themed rap and the pointless EDM-beatswitch. A lot of this just feels undercooked compared to the debut EP’s rock solid singles. Hard to say what’s going wrong, but I doubt Red Velvet will suffer too much in the long run.
[3]

Thomas Inskeep: Horn-y, hyper-caffeinated K-pop spiced liberally with schoolyard chants but, unfortunately, little else.
[4]

Jonathan Bogart: Not dumb enough.
[6]

Patrick St. Michel: Add “Dumb Dumb” to the pantheon of K-Pop songs highlighting the general smartness of the industry. It’s clearly inspired by “Bang Bang” — down to the monosyllabic title — but taken in a bunch of exciting new directions over the course of its run time, like nobody in the production meeting could decide on one idea and just stuck them all in. As scatterbrained as it gets, though, the end result is a really catchy song…which is how you could describe a lot of pop out of Korea over the last few years. It would almost be a bit predictable if it weren’t for moments of genuine wonder, like the rap interlude made up of nothing but Michael Jackson puns.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Those giddy ascending vocal parts! And video game sonics to match! More more more!
[7]

Will Adams: Despite its best efforts to sneak up on me in the middle of the day and drill right into my brain, “Bang Bang” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HDdjwpPM3Y never won me over. “Dumb Dumb” takes the same kitchen sink approach but distributes its pyrotechnics more evenly between vocals and music, which is the only way I can explain away the six random measures of trance in the bridge. Each listen, I can’t decide whether the song’s fascinating or annoying.
[5]

Brad Shoup: Constant scales and rises, goosed with sax excerpts (some Meghan Trainor, some “GDFR”). It ran me so ragged I could barely appreciate the MJ section.
[5]

Moses Kim: The verses are all escalating action, rising pitches and woozy 808 beats and “baby-baby-baby-baaaaaabes” drawled out Valley Girl style. The chorus mashes its disparate elements together into prime traffic jam pop: SM has been experimenting with how many cooks they can get away with employing in the same kitchen, and this may be the agency’s high point to date, synthesizing the brashness of f(x) with the cohesion of SHINEE and the sweetness of Girls’ Generation. Songs about being dumbstruck by love are rarely composed with such intelligence, nor are they embodied as playfully as Red Velvet manage here.
[8]