“니 그런 동정 따윈 필요 없어.”

“1.2.3.4” by Lee Hi | Yes, I’m writing about K-pop. Rainy introduced this song to me last week, perhaps hoping that I’d listen. It helps that Lee Hi has this gooey, delicious, sexy voice – I shouldn’t say this because she’s 16, or 17 – and this song has a swinging, Mayer Hawthorne-ish vibe. We had a conversation about K-pop being in its own world, not exactly fitting in with the rest of my playlist – although, then again, my biases lay towards guitar music and the older pop stuff. It helps, we figured, that this song has that, well, swinging, Mayer Hawthorne-ish vibe. It’s not gonna make me a convert, but it’s nice to see that the Koreans can go past the bubblegum, like we’d all conveniently assume. (I told Clarence, she of the Keane backgrounders I posted last September, that I’m amazed at how intense their efforts are in releasing these things. Spin‘s write-up on the Korean pop industry is a must-read. This was all before PSY, though…) Too bad YG Entertainment is angling her as part of another group. (Have things I should hear? Drop me a line here.)