Back in August I was primed for DSP Media’s new girl group April to arrive on the scene. My belated recognition that I love KARA and Rainbow, and that the last few albums from both have in fact been uniformly splendid, led me to hope that, for all DSP’s legendary madcap mismanagement, maybe –they were just a great label for music?
I don’t know if I have any better excuse for my failure to follow through in exploring April at the time of their debut than the discovery that the maknae is only thirteen. Not that I love K-pop for shameful reasons anyway– [Ed.: I figure all reasons to love K-pop are shameful?]–let alone illicit ones, Philistine— but the thought of fanboying over some thirteen year old just seemed a little too, even for me, well– And besides, they’d probably be making, like, kids music or something, right?
So I watched the MV for “Dream Candy” when it debuted and recognized it was really good, and I felt the song was good too, but all the same, I suppose I filed it away as kids music and moved on. Maybe when they’re older, right? Idk.
But finally, the other week, I dove in and bought the album, and guess what? It’s really good. Very much into the 3rd standard deviation of cuteness, yeah; but it’s a good sort of cuteness. Melodic, bright, breezy, clever, non-cloying.
I mean, “Dream Candy” is a very charming, ebullient pop-dance anthem with a soaring tune: what’s not to love? And the video!
–This Bavarian travel fantasia is so blissfully whimsical, it makes a great, if brief, film unto itself. Some influence from Red Velvet’s brilliant “Happiness” MV is evident, but this video jettisons the boho-chic psychedelic trappings and instead embraces an almost Viscontean lyricism, abetted by occasional lightning-quick montages adumbrating their surreally logical steps into an Alpine fantasy land. The elegant trappings of civilized Anglo-Germanic girlhood (including colorful maps and Pelican Classics paperbacks) help pack our heroines off into a world where modern and Medieval, indoors and outdoors, morph and interchange in an increasingly giddy escape into a Wordsworthian wonderland.
And, by sheer authority of creative power and winsome aegyo, April have won every right to it. It occurs to me that “Dream Candy” encodes and celebrates so many quintessentially European aesthetic values, it should serve as a rebuke to the present White race that a bunch of Korean teens playing dress up champion the ideal of Mitteleuropa while the actual Middle Europeans are giving it away to filthy Turkic, Arabic, and damned Afr*c*n scum.
Of course, Korean immigration is not the answer (vastly superior as such immigrants would be to the invaders we get instead). April are only visitors– mind-travelers at that!– but their tour into dreamland, swift though it be, earns its own perch in the pantheon of Art– that Elysium that transcends politics, where all the noble scions of the Ice Peoples collectively lay their dreamwrought wreaths in tribute to the hope of something heavenly. And April already prove themselves to be another K-pop girl group that has transcended the quotidian realm, spinning the enchantment of loveliness and song that spellbinds us all.
[Ed.: Man, you’re in a lyrical mood. Weren’t you and Whorefinder just trading stories on heartiste about Jewish perverts?]
–Which is all the more reason why my mind needs the refreshment of some “Dream Candy”, Bob!
Let’s add the Music Bank Debut Stage:
–Poor Zombie Shane. If he ever talks about the Darkness In The Heart again, I’ll have to show him this!
These are the kinds of immigrants America needs.
Speaking of which, I see that Marianne and her friends have struck again—through the Western censorship boards this time. I wonder how long it will be before the Elites decide K-pop is a bad influence on our culture? (For doing things like causing heterosexual impulses in normal men, for example).