It is the day after 127 day and I am writing about EXO! Good God!
EXO is relevant to my life right now and I am not sure why. They did have a comeback recently, but it lacked two of their main vocalists for complicated legal reasons and also apparently half of the music video is AI-generated. The goat has been washed, so to speak, for around three years now, I fear.
And yet I find myself thinking about Chanyeol more and more frequently. I don't even fuck with Chanyeol like that. I'm just thinking about him.
Do I think EXO has a superior discography? Certainly superior to most groups'; I do fear they were most active at a time when it was simply unheard of to make good music, resulting in songs like "Ko Ko Bop" and "Love Shot" (please don't kill me). However, the main vocalists of EXO - I refer to Chen, Baekhyun, D.O. (Kyungsoo), and at one point Luhan - possess some of the highest, clearest, handsomest tones I have ever heard. I think people who composed for EXO understood this, generally, so EXO songs are set apart to me by the beauty of their melodies.
Their debut song "MAMA", released in Korean and Chinese, starts with this crazy high note. Here is D.O. singing in the Korean version.
Here is Chen singing in the Chinese version.(You can hear how much sharper Chen's high tone is.)
What interests me most about these kinds of parts is their flashy melody, not just their virtuosity. That climb from a fifth to a major seventh shows up again in "Wolf".
I'm going to assign you the Herculean task of ignoring everything else but the music in this clip, including D.O. sounding like the guy from Fall Out Boy and Kai's flagrant cultural appropriation, both of which are important topics, if the latter more so. The song is also bad. Sorry about that.The producers have supplemented Chen's shaky high note with a blindingly tight harmony not uncommon in any K-pop song of this time, and certainly not uncommon in EXO's music. Also not surprising is the insanity that is the range of the chorus melody, which was originally a whole step higher (try not to laugh). I find it interesting that the first phrase ends on the third scale degree.
Then, at the end of the second chorus phrase, the high note. When I heard it for the first time I was floored. What a direction to take this song in! I have cut the clip off as abruptly as the high note was cut off in the song, because the producers did have an obligation to remind us that the song is bad, and that any semblance of good music is to be pruned lest it infect the tree.
Finally I will draw attention to the famous bridge of "Tempo", released in 2018.
The "I can't believe" part is more significant considering it's a callback to the intro of the song.The first real chill-inducing moment is the relaxation into the sweet "Nareul gamssa aneun yuilhan namanui savior" after that jazzy first motive. The second is the gentle little "Modu geureon neol baraboge dwae" before Baekhyun comes in swinging and Suho echoes him. Contradictory to EXO's wishes as expressed in the chorus (do not mess up their tempo), the tempo of this song is both held (in a literal sense) and disrupted (in a metaphorical sense) throughout. While underneath the acapella harmonies do not change tonally, Suho's gentle inquiries that begin the bridge contrast with Baekhyun's aggression nicely.
Anyway, here was me getting pretentious about EXO. Here before Baekhyun goes to jail for tax evasion. (For legal reasons that is a joke.)