alright everyone gather round it’s fuckin story time
so background: i’m 18 and in my first year of college. i’m not a music major, but i have been studying music since i was literally eight years old. i know my shit. for my honors music class, we have to identify musical elements in songs from genres of our choice. i, like the trash i am, chose kpop. please note that i am an exo stan, a vixx fan, and a casual fan of mamamoo and bts.
so when we listened to exo’s lotto we found:
polyphony (multiple melodies at once)
duple meter (it was in 4/4)
or tempo (constant 100 bpm)
almost always either one singer or unison singers
tl;dr it’s a basic ass pop dance song, typical of exo and typical of sm
when we listened to mamamoo’s piano man we found:
sounds jazzy but only because of background ornamentation, doesn’t actually have a jazz groove
tempo change in beginning
homophony (multiple people singing the same thing on different notes) and polytextuality
basically this is if a classically trained orchestral musician tried to play jazz it’s super metered and rigid, not actual jazz
when we listened to bts’s not today we found:
polytextuality and polyphony at end which just means a ton of shit is happening at the same time
ostenato aka one line on repeat the entire time (it’s in the bass)
this is literally just another basic ass promotion dance song, nothing special
when we listened to vixx’s fantasy we found:
beethoven’s moonlight sonata movement 1 except the tempo is doubled to 76
because instead of this piece being metered ¾ like the original sonata
fantasy goes from 9/8 to 5/8 and back and forth
they literally put a triple meter inside a duple meter
melisma and ornamentation all over the place
violin riffs through the roof
switches between unison and homophony constantly
so sit the fuck down with your bts is better than vixx shit. we went through all of bts’s discography trying to find a song that had enough musical elements that we could use it. lemme tell you, there wasn’t one. it’s all either 4/4 pop dance beats with no contextualization (aka there’s bass but nothing happens) or slow and sappy but still no contextualization (aka it sounds like it has a lot of musicality but it doesn’t). when we did the same thing with vixx? boom. error. eternity. dynamite. spider. chained up. hyde. for all the praise bts gets for writing and producing their own stuff, vixx is still more musical than bts could ever hope to be, and i’m saying this from as objective a standpoint as possible.
i honestly enjoy bts’s music. it’s catchy and fun and it’s good for walking home or studying when i’m not motivated. but to say that any part of bts has more musicality than vixx is a downright lie.
now i know that this post was about vocals, so let me remind you of this too. leo or ken alone could outsing the entirety of bts. from a technical standpoint, leo and ken are just stronger singers, and part of that is because they’ve had leading roles in musicals. i love jin to pieces, but he doesn’t have the training to support his voice, same with jimin. taehyung’s voice is much more easily supported because it’s lower, but he doesn’t have the technical abilities that ken does even in his low range. jungkook is definitely the strongest singer out of the bunch, but the kid is still facing puberty-created changes to his voice. when he actually sings (ie. in his covers or Butterfly), he’s very breathy, which means that he isn’t breathing fully and is probably not trained in how to safely control his volume. it also means that he isn’t trained in his falsetto/head voice, which is where a lot of these songs seem to put him since his vocal break seems to be right in the middle of that range. jin and jimin also suffer from this issue, taehyung not so much because of the timbre of his voice (his issue is moreso with pronunciation). now, leo has a high voice, and ken is pretty up there too, but you would never see this issue from either of them, because they’re older and have spent more time on training these issues out. the bts vocalists can definitely reach that level someday, but they aren’t even close right now.
so in conclusion, jungkook is in no way a better vocalist than probably anyone in vixx, especially their main vocalists, bts is in no way more musical than vixx, and everyone please have a nice day. tea is served.
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