If NCT was a building, it would be a treehouse, and Taeyong would be the branch on which NCT sits. He has been instrumental in the NCT mythology from the very beginning. His voice, that lilting baritone of his, is the first voice heard on the very first NCT song, “The Seventh Sense”. Whether one enjoys NCT 127 songs or not largely hinges on whether one can accept his raps and adlibs: the reason the songs are and go abrasive in the first place, how much of real estate they (used to) take, the sheer presence of it. It’s not carefully trained to sound synthesized. It’s carefully trained to grab attention at every moment.
“SHALALA”, Taeyong’s debut and co-written by him, ultimately banks on the fact nobody but Taeyong could make the song work. More crucially, “SHALALA” has touching points with NCT 127 — cowbells that could come from “2 Baddies”, a flute at the last chorus reminiscent of “Sticker” and, yes, Taeyong himself. As he proves on SHALALA, his artistic identity is expansive, and NCT is one aspect of it. The neon green hair he sports in the music video and during promotions makes it clear that he’s well aware.
SHALALA the EP is charming. Credited as the sole songwriter on all the tracks outside of the debut, all of which he also co-composed and co-produced, it is a culmination on the Taeyong who used to release songs for free. Back then, he was inching ever closer to his artistic vision. Now, he’s arrived to it. But “SHALALA” the music video is an event that even a non-fan understands. More important, “SHALALA” has a music video so memorable it alone can invite to repeated listens. The song? An earworm and a half already.
At the root of so much of “SHALALA” the song is Missy Elliott, herself an artist so expansive that calling her one thing immediately threatens to reduce her. With her partner in crime Timbaland, she saw a future and fearlessly chartered it; one that started while producing for her close friend Aaliyah and later translated to her own debut, 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly. At the turn of the millennium, “Work It” sounded like no other hip hop tracks out: the machine bleeping and warbling behind her, for one. Missy would stretch her vocals so as to seemingly insinuate she could be everything and still be her would leave us to understand her voice as an instrument that could be manipulated like everything else in the studio.
“SHALALA” asks Taeyong for similar ideas, and so he does: he drops his voice only to lilt it, raps only to sing, sing only to rap again, harmonizes with himself. Meanwhile, the percussion changes every eight bars — first big and tight, then wide and bouncy. There’s a bass loop in the pre-chorus that adds to the arena of full command, and the chorus adds clanky can-like drums to the mix. The bridge adds congas to the mix, something more metallic, and something distorted. These are beats that constantly demands attention. But rather than fight with any of them, Taeyong is on top of it all, especially in the bridge. “Cash it out, camera flashin,” he drawls, “peep my tweed ja-cket it’s my fashion.”
The music video for ”SHALALA” begins with Taeyong declaring to lay low in a microphone. Next, a white man dressed like he’s from ancient Rome, firing away at a nasty keyboard while eating French fries. It is God, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing: Taeyong from some multiverse — here called “metaverse”, hacking away at God’s security system. He succeeds, sending three CRT screens into three different universes. One is the Yetti [sic] ice world, another a bowling rink where Taeyong plays on a Gameboy, and lastly the Middle Ages. They can’t help but interact with it — that moment…! the subtitles declare, the world distorted. Gaming Taeyong arrives to the Ice Age. Yeti Taeyong is in 2023 at a bowling rink. The Knight Taeyong works for a company in the 1980s now. They all thrive in each new environment, but God can’t allow mess: he must delete everything in order to reset all to its original state. The Knight mopes as his coworkers wish him goodbye with a cake and an office party. Gamer Taeyong parties one last time with the Yettis. And then it’s all restored; God has won.
In a world where we can’t imagine a future — not only in the way Mark Fisher detailed on Capitalist Realism, but in the literal way of a felt incoming climate apocalypse — we imagine alternate presents. Some of that may be to retrace ghosts that have never come to be (the Fisherian response) and thus is miserable/haunted at present, a conclusion that protagonist Evelyn Wang arrives at in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a basis on which the film later adds its kumbayah response. Some of that may be to console oneself that the present is still the best that we got, a plot point every time Dr Strange, a time traveller, is brought up in the MCU. Then there’s the Spider-Verse approach, i.e the idea that the world is far bigger than one can imagine, and each of them is as valid and important as the other one. Though Taeyong has named EEAAO as a main inspiration for the music video, it has more in common with Spider-Verse ideologically and, aesthetically, last year’s Love Theory, a one-off single featuring Wonstein. It’s a refreshing ideology.
There’s many interpretations for this music video, some sillier, others more serious. I like to think that Taeyong thinks of himself a disruptor, one at ease in any environment, donning any style, performing any genre. He hacks into God’s security system because his talent reaches upward to heaven. God would have to reset it all to a pre-Taeyong state to achieve peace, but the Taeyong thrown into the Yetti world — the 2023 Taeyong — parties with nary a worry. The hacker Taeyong dances on, as if he knows he could, at any time, return to DDOS God’s firewall and hack it again.
A silly one: since Taeyong is everything — protagonist, villain, side character — he’s naturally also, well, the infamous “bus driver” character in RPF fanfic, the lowest of cameos.
A serious one: metaverses seem officially over as Silicon Valley has moved onto the next thing, chatbots powered by artificial intelligence. That they’re deleted in this music video is keenly in-tune with contemporary conversation, in more ways than one: Kwangya Club, named after SM’s metaverse, has announced on June 7 that it will end its services on September 10.
Taeyong never wears a tweed jacket in the music video, by the way. Four characters, one chainmail, and no tweed jacket that is his fashion. Thus, the tweed jacket is a metaphor for any piece of clothing that has Taeyong look like, as he raps in one verse, he came straight out of Milan despite living in Seoul.
With the advent of TikTok dances, K-Pop now leans so hard into the easily-replicable aspect of theirs that we’ve arrived back to an era when “point dance” typically consisted of a hand movement anyone could follow. This falls perfectly in line with the era of the nostalgia for the self K-Pop is currently in. Last year, Nayeon’s “POP!” — itself a callback to Hyuna’s glorious run of early-10s summer singles — had a chorus choreography that simply required hand-eye coordination. Taeyong goes Macarena, a logical end point as the first dance craze that we can only now call viral, but society had no word for back then.
With choreographer Leejung, Taeyong sought out to replicate a feeling of old school hip hop, and there’s an overall laxer feeling to the choreography than many of NCT 127’s. But the adapted “Macarena” inside the chorus — a dance famously so low on the ability scale all that it requires is to tap at various parts of one’s body — that unsurprisingly made it to the “SHALALA“ TikTok challenge. Just like with “POP!”, it is easy to replicate and endlessly fun to do when that part comes on in the song. The benefits go both ways: on all live stages, Taeyong sings with relative ease, never once sounding out of breath.There were times in which EPs and albums had songs performed by only one member of the group, on the premise that the member wasn’t different to warrant their own release, but remarkable enough to add a nuance to the group’s sound. (Not to mention as a justification of solo stages in a concert.) That concept feels a bit unrealistic now, in 2023, given how vicious solo stanning can be, how quickly perceived unfairness spirals to disaster. Though Taeyong, with fellow rapper Mark, has had unit songs within the NCT 127 discography, “SHALALA” brings back what JYP Entertainment had — sort of — posited in 2012, particularly with the release of the EP 23, Male, Single, 2PM’s Jang Wooyoung first solo venture. Far from being a reinvention of Jang Wooyoung as a solo artist, it slot in nicely with the rest of 2PM’s fare: horndog club music for the discerning male, single, twenty-three year old superstar. This was before Taemin’s solo debut ACE completely upended on what a solo debut could look like.
This Wooyoung approach is reminiscent to G-Dragon, who pushed both his solo career, unit ventures, and his group’s sound into similar directions — EDM there, rock there — to wildly different results, but always under an overarching sonic Big Bang umbrella. The solo artist (Joy, Nayeon, Jooheon, and even Wonho to an extent) has become part of the group brand again. There’s exceptions — BTS and EXO solos come to mind — but Taeyong is not one of them. As the shelf lives of groups begin to lengthen, solos become less a means through which to completely differentiate oneself, and more like one lane of a highway. In Taeyong’s case, that his solo contains traces of NCT is perhaps unsurprising considering that Taeyong himself pushed for “NCT Lab” to happen, the NCT version of SM station. Nevertheless, SHALALA makes one wonder why Taeyong was never allowed a co-composing credit for an NCT 127 track. Perhaps for the next release.“I’m really good at entertaining, yeah,” he sings. He’s right. “SHALALA” is one of the best songs of the year.