I'm a little confused as to the title of this song. Supposedly there is "Because I'm The Best" and "Roll Deep" for the English titles. The former is more or less the translation from the Korean, so I'm not too sure where "Roll Deep" came around. I'll just call this "Because I'm The Best" since the music shows have been calling it that. Anyway, this song is a dance / club track at heart. Everything from the electric instrumental, colour palette, constant spam of "hey," and the chant-like chorus certainly fulfill this characteristic. The song isn't particularly bad, but it does suffer from the whole multi-song syndrome, where parts of the song seem too different than (the) others. Just comparing the chorus to the break at 1:16. Neither really take away from the dance theme but they are different enough to where it's noticeable. Bringing up that segment is important because Hyuna's English is really bad haha. I'm really having a tough time believing the English lyrics. "You can't touch me, don't touch me" sure sounds like "You can touch me, don't touch me" which I was gonna criticize for being ridiculous. "Sorry I'm a dope girl" and "baby I'm bad all day" is also highly suspect with her pronunciation of "dope" and "bad" just being way off. Hell, even some of her Korean isn't very clear. For example, some of the lines at 0:48. Speaking of, that section is extremely hard to listen to based on how she's squeaking those words out.
When I reviewed Hara's "Choco Chip Cookies," I mentioned how Giriboy's rap feature helped the song stay relevant as opposed to being a strength of the song. Here, we have BTOB's Ilhoon who does an absolutely fantastic job with the rap but whether it's good enough to make the rest of the song good remains to be seen. I'm definitely impressed though, considering the last time I saw Ilhoon feature was in G.NA's "Oops" which was over 2 years ago. Seems like he has gone through rapid improvement since. He also shows up rather prominently in the music video, which is a nice show of Cube team support, though I'm not sure why he had to remain hidden earlier.
Honestly, black will always be the dominant hair colour for Hyuna. She doesn't make the blonde look bad or anything, but black is way more fierce which is sort of what this song was going for. Speaking of fierce and aggressive, Hyuna once again pushes the envelope and she isn't even subtle about it this time. I mean she's literally dancing in a bra. I'm 100% positive this choreography will be modified for the live performances and maybe even the lyrics. This is Hyuna and Korea we're talking about. The video is pretty standard. As mentioned earlier Ilhoon hangs around and there's a variety of colour and settings. Even some whips here and there. There are also some parts where they show Hyuna in a bunch of quickly changing outfits. It wasn't really that cool when f(x) did it with "Danger" and it's not really that cool now. I suppose you can't blame for trying, or reviving an old thing that happened in another video.
All in all, it seems Hyuna took a decent gamble with "Because I'm The Best" and didn't really win. The song is loud and fierce but fails to live up to the expectations set by "Red," which was also racy and charismatic. The only true strength of the song is the rapping, but if that's the prize of your song (as a soloist especially) that isn't a good quality. She'll receive praise and criticism alike, and there will more than likely be modifications on the song and choreography. It's just not quite as powerful as past hits.
[ Overall: 76 / 100 ]
No comments:
Post a Comment