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Every Sunday I look back at the preceding week in kpop and pick out the music video or performance I liked best. This week I have chosen
TRI.BE -- 'LORO (Feat. ELLY)' Performance Video

https://youtu.be/5XaS2dF0p1M?si=K29u86HjDrdLrx6U

As the hoopla of the awards season begins, this non award related video caught my attention. Although “Loro” forms one side of the recently released single album “The Little Drummer Girls”, the song itself is more than two years old, having been released as a B side when TRI.BE came back in 2021 with “Rub-A-Dum” as the title track.

That it was released a long time ago in kpop time will not surprise kpop fans when they hear the song’s reggaeton influenced Latin beat. This sound was in vogue back then, but has waned in popularity more recently. I thought I might get tired of it, but in fact it is a sound I still enjoy. Less enjoyable – for me at least – is Elly (formerly LE of EXID) rapping in the second verse. I know that one of the special features of kpop is the frequent switching of musical styles within one song, but I often find the second verse rap or trap the least satisfying part of a song. I felt this here, particularly because the long rap verse is not only musically but also visually disruptive; Elly’s look has nothing in common that of the other idols, and she breaks up the flow of the choreography. I will append a performance video of “Loro” that came out two years ago. That still includes a rap, but it is much less disruptive, being performed by a group member.

Unsurprisingly, some of the groups I like best, such as GFriend or Lovelyz, have little or no rapping in their songs. This preference does not mean I dislike all kpop rap; I often enjoy hearing WJSN’s Exy and Oh My Girl’s Mimi, but I suspect that hip hop aficionados would think those idols’ raps stand in much the same relation to the rapping they relish as Shirley Temple mocktails do to shots of strong liquor.

As well as the Latin sound, I also like the incorporation of a number of Spanish lines into the lyrics, because it’s always pleasing to see “global” in kpop meaning something more than “Anglophones + the Japanese”. Yet I am puzzled by the use of the Italian expression “dolce vita” here. Do Spanish speakers use this Italian expression in Spanish just as English speakers do in English? Or was it a case of the lyricist mistakenly assuming it was Spanish? Or is it an expression familiar to Koreans?