Potpourri: Monsta X (2015-2017)
Part 1 of the boyband's retrospective covers their first years and the song that changed their career forever.
Korean Pop music as we know it begins with a boy group that debuted in 1992. Seo Taiji sought to make music like the hip-hop and rap he obsessed over, and the resulting album Seo Taiji And Boys with its lead single I Know became a smash hit in South Korea. The song itself is squarely New Jack Swing, with elements of rock splashed into it, and a chorus that fits within the conventions of 90s hip hop music. There's equal parts rapping and singing, as well as a healthy mix of English and Korean, but the star of the show is Seo Taiji himself: not only does he open the song, he's written it himself.
At the time I Know was first performed on Saturday Night Music Show, Shownu — the oldest member of Monsta X — was two months old. By the time he was ready to debut in 2015, just short of turning twenty-three — the final portion of it dramatized on reality show NO.MERCY — K-Pop had become an entire system by itself. It was poised to break through the mainstream, but hadn't managed to do so fully — it'd take a couple years to reach to that point. Musically, though, a crucial strain from boygroup music never strayed too far off from I Know. There is a very neat line you can draw from I Know to Big Bang to BAP, Block B, and BTS (I think that B bit is more coincidence than on purpose). This line can be characterized by a couple of things: there is an outsized focus on a rapper, who is sort of the musical leader of the group. He and his co-rapper are everywhere on the song. The vocals are loud and dramatic, matching the aggressive nature of these songs. These songs draw from rock and the hard-hitting percussion of hip hop. Everyone's acting really tough. (And there is an overabundance of Black aesthetics employed, especially in earlier iterations of this sound.) There was, of course, a melodic strain of boygroup music as well, one that drew on whatever the United States discarded a couple months prior and was close to J-Pop. In 2015, with songs like EXO’s double-whammy Call Me Baby and Love Me Right, SHINee’s View, and Infinite’s Bad, that strain dominated. But here, too, there was a rapper. There was always English and Korean. Love Me Right and Call Me Baby were loud, and Bad's main conceit was its crunchy percussion. So these strains weren't segregated. Speaking of segregation: girlgroup music, constantly poised for a general listening public rather than just teenage girls, has a slightly different musical history. Later — much later — they would also adopt some noisy elements of the rapping strain of boygroup music. Not in 2015, though.
2015 also brought us one song that didn't fit this dominant strain of vocal-focused music. It was by Big Bang and bore the name Bang Bang Bang, the second single of Big Bang's album MADE. Bang Bang Bang employs blunt synths that sound like electric farts, an intensely propulsive, whiny beat, and then comes the chorus. "Bang bang bang" If that lyrical prowess didn't convince you, this is followed up with: "bang! bang! bang!" Air sirens go off and the percussion takes a lazy backseat. Such is the chorus. Then we're back to propulsion and high-wailing synths. It's a song that is halfway between rave banger and regular pop, as if it wants to have its cake and eat it too. And it not only was a hit — everyone thought they needed to get onto this strain. It was an evolution of 2012’s Fantastic Baby (that also employs an anti-drop of a chorus), but Bang Bang Bang makes wow, fantastic baby like a grim prophecy to what was about to come. And so, the melodic strain of pop music was effectively over after Bang Bang Bang. Luckily, the two groups that would expand on the ideas Bang Bang Bang brought about made music much better than Bang Bang Bang. Monsta X is one of these groups, a group that would straddle the line between the melodic and the abrasive throughout their discography, equally inspired by both Big Bang and Infinite. (NCT 127 is the other, and that group is utterly unafraid to truly ruffle feathers musically.)
But it wasn't just that Bang Bang Bang changed the fabric of K-Pop music. 2015 was also the entry year for a lot of people into K-Pop (a lot, but not all, coming fresh off One Direction's hiatus), and thus this song became one of their entry points. Another: BTS's jubilant Dope, which also employs a mostly instrumental chorus drop, this time with horns! And this was years before BTS became the global phenomenon of today. Lastly, one of the introduction points came from Monsta X, which I'll discuss at greater length later. Once fans were introduced to this sound and stuck around with boygroups not in spite of but because of it, it became the dominant strain and financial model of boygroup music. There became a demand for “pots and pans”, pretty boys, lore, and musical consistency. A new market outside South Korea for all things K-Pop began to blossom: the United States. Monsta X's main fandom was there. If that doesn't sound really interesting to you, consider that this was not financially viable for K-Pop acts up until 2019 or so. Monsta X got by four long years with an international fandom that was larger than the domestic fandom, and they did so with noisy, yes, but melodic and consistent music. NCT 127 and Monsta X paved the way for everything a certain group of people seek out in K-Pop today. They influenced a whole slew of groups that debuted after they did. And when international K-Pop fans jumped Monsta X's ship for younger and louder, when one of the most popular members had a scandal and had to leave, they recouped and were embraced by their home country. In the eighth year of their existence, Monsta X is still an active act. That makes them very exciting to talk about, and I'm very excited to cover them. (NCT 127, I want to cover at another time — I'm already excited just thinking of it.)
Monsta X themselves name Big Bang as one of their inspiration — duh — but there's others, too: Michael Jackson, for instance. The aforementioned Shownu became an idol because of soloist Rain, and Minhyuk because of the visual and main vocal of TVXQ, Kim Jaejoong. Monsta X, that name, though. The AAVE-tinged "Monsta" and X already suggest aggression and wildness and is sustainably nonsensical enough to pass by, but no; monsta is actually short for mon (my in French) and sta, which is the romanized way of the English star. X is for an unknown existence. Never change, K-Pop. Consisting of vocalists Shownu, Wonho (active 2015-2019), Kihyun, Minhyuk, and Hyungwon, as well as rappers Jooheon and I.M, this is Monsta X.
Trespass
While working on this piece, I was curious if Starship Entertainment — Monsta X’s label — had an ambition or a raison d'etre for the group to exist, some kind of lore of the entertainment company, like how NCT came to be because Lee Sooman conceived the group less as one boyband and more as a system (and, also, because he was obsessed with Johnny's AKB48). So I looked up the first bits of the reality show No.MERCY. Hyolyn of SISTAR, a labelmate of Monsta X, says "We're going to debut a boygroup" while the show cuts over to Shownu saying he has to debut or else it's over for him. And Starship Entertainment was serious about Monsta X just... being some kind of financial asset. In a very lucky stroke, BTS and Block B left the noisy rap stuff behind (a bit) in 2015. So Monsta X instantly tapped into a niche before its absence could be felt. But that bit is just luck. The main idea is: just debut the group.
Trespass sounds dated the second you hear it — not just now, in 2023, but in 2015, when it first came out. An irritating buzz not unlike a mosquito's, amplified much too loud, swirls from ear to ear. As soon as it opens the song it also remains the most interesting bit of this production. The title is an adlib shouted midway through the chorus like its own fan chant, lost in the mix while Kihyun shouts can you call this a crime or how can you hate this. Jooheon, the main rapper, takes real estate of the song not just by singing the chorus and dominating the entire second verse, but also the way all the sticky bits belong to him (knock knock, the instantly iconic silyehamnida, excuse my charisma). And yet, despite all this, Trespass is oddly charming. The irritating buzz stays in the head, and the way the chorus crashes sooner than it really should invites to more listens. The end, in which I.M gets his rap, showcases the dynamic that Jooheon and I.M would expand on again and again: I.M, with his disaffected timbre and fluent English versus Jooheon who vocally hurls himself onto the beat with the fiery energy of a blaze. It's the right call to get I.M at the very end ask Tell me now: who's hot and who's not, making the song much cooler than it was no three minutes ago. You almost admire the chutzpah here. How can you hate this?
Of course, the dated nature of this song also comes from well-established boygroup tropes. Jooheon and I.M get most of the song, the vocalists have to make do with a little bit of verse and a little bit of chorus, which recalls many, many Big Bang, BTS, and Block B efforts. You can also see it in the music video, which takes liberal inspiration from BTS's No More Dream and Block B's Niliri Mambo (bonus: that hair, lol). Wonho flashes his abs for ten long seconds, which feels like a particular bit of foreshadowing to the kind of image he'd become known for, but at the time that was a move guaranteed to get the fangirls screaming (see also: Jimin doing the same move in No More Dream). It's by no means an outstanding debut. If this came out now, people would instantly pan it. In fact, reception of the song back then were less than favorable — the police brutality bit in the beginning is particularly horrible. Somebody on omonatheydidnt (a Livejournal community that spun off ohnotheydidnt) says, "I feel like this whole concept here is 2-3 years too late." Which it was.
The EP to come out of this, also called Trespass, furthers the idea of Jooheon as Block B’s Zico 2.0 (Big Bang’s G-Dragon 3.0) (Seo Taiji 4.0) and I.M as the trusty co-rapper a la TOP of Big Bang by attaching the rap song of the unit Jooheon-Hyungwon-I.M of NO.MERCY at the very end. The skit that ends Honestly follows Dasom of SISTAR and I.M in some lover's quarrel, but sounds more like reading lines off a Korean textbook. Elsewhere, One Love (with the chorus continuing two love, three love) is as faceless as the name suggests, though there's an early promise of Shownu's reedy vocals here. The rest is mostly filler music, the way a lot of K-Pop albums were at the time. 2015 was the first year where complete bodies of work got genuine attention overseas and domestically (f(x)'s 4 Walls, released 2015, is the first K-Pop release US publication Pitchfork reviewed) and, as a result, many entertainment labels — among them, Starship — would follow suit with their artists. In the case of Monsta X, it marks a solid year between debut and consistent music release. But until then, there's always at least one solid B-side.
RUSH
"The first comeback" (or, for normal music fans, the second release) is a trope in K-Pop fan circles (so the "third album" of K-Pop, if you will). After extending the feelers with the debut, which can — though may not be — unidentifiable for the rest of the group's career, the first comeback should reasonably prove the group is here to stay and expand on some ideas thrown in at the start. Later, this can all be discarded again; many groups do. But the first comeback can prove more substantial than the debut. Many iconic K-Pop tracks are first comebacks: Wonder Girls's Tell Me, NCT 127's Limitless, G-IDLE's Hann, Twice's Cheer Up, Infinite's Before The Dawn. Monsta X's labelmates, WJSN, have a particularly pretty one here with Secret; Monsta X's boygroup predecessor, Boyfriend, got Sweetune to produce their adrenaline-filled Don't Touch My Girl. But Monsta X's own first comeback RUSH does not fit this trope — at all. If Trespass sounds dated, then RUSH is instantly dead on arrival and has even less to offer than the debut, a reject of a reject of Zico's "Block B rejects" hard drive that he himself tossed aside as soon as HER blew up in 2014. The sole interesting idea in RUSH are the synths that sound closer to electronics farting, and that is an overstatement. Again, the verses are forgettable and usher to the chorus, and we're back to the electric farts and nondescript "vroom vroom" as a chorus. Now that I type this, maybe this is less from Zico's hard drive and somebody just trying to get their Bang Bang Bang on. Huh!
The rest of the RUSH EP is alright, if a bit light on genuine greatness. (Amen is excluded from this narrative.) But Starship was eager to promote this boyband to a bigger audience — and in 2015, Youtube was a veritable platform for such gambits. Couple that with the fact that B-sides are promoted on music shows, often as follow-up to the lead single, a clip was released on Starship's official Youtube account in October 2015. In the accompanying EP, the track performed ranks right after RUSH and bears the title Hero. As soon as the song begins, it makes RUSH sound like child's play. The ominous, thin synths set the stage for a short Jooheon hypeman moment, followed by a sound of Super Mario leveling up. And then, those horns — forming the basis for the song, pulsing under the vocal lines only to come back to the forefront to the mostly instrumental chorus that repeats I can be your hero, I can be your man. But that's not even the most surprising bit of the song: it's the fact that Monsta X is no longer Jooheon and I.M with some others. The vocal melody, in fact, takes center stage for this song — chief of which is Kihyun, whose vocals sweep with a rockstar fervor for the first time here. (Shownu, nabbing the prechorus spots here, has better moments in other songs) But don't count out Wonho; his voice is thin and nasal, but firmly baritone, utterly comfortable with the beat provided here. And in the video, he's eye-catching not just with his abs flashing (again) but the devilish grin that he sports while dancing in 2:45. Hero changed just about everything for Monsta X; musically, aesthetically, and even in terms of which members got what parts. It marks the first time a more noisy-yet-melodic approach was an introduction point for budding K-Pop fans, and the all-English line in the chorus helped tremendously. Today, it is their most viewed video, eclipsing Rush over five times in total, and their most streamed song on Spotify with 60 million listens. So Starship promoted it in music broadcasts with a new version in what is, to my knowledge, the first and last time any entertainment label released a digital repackage. That version removes the warm horns and adds a scratchy synth to it. I liked that version a lot when Hero first came out, but now I recognize it's totally inferior to the original. And yes, this was my first introduction point to Monsta X, too. It is the archetypal Monsta X song. If you don’t like this one, you will like one of its many, many sons down the line.
The Clan Pt. 1 <Lost>
I mentioned earlier that BTS ditched their original, noisy boygroup style in 2015 somewhat. Let's go back to that a bit. Around two weeks before Monsta X debuted, BTS released their third EP The Most Beautiful Moment In Life, Part 1 (or HYYH pt. 1, which is the abbrevation of the Korean hwayang yeonhwa) with the lead single I Need U. A complete tonal shift from their previous efforts, I Need U traded the shout/rap-heavy titles for a more vocal-based, dramatic one. It did have a drop after a chorus, but it didn’t explode. Instead, it pulled you deeper to the song's core dramatics. The song brought a coveted music show win for them on The Show, where fanvotes decide the winner — it sounds laughable now considering where BTS would go after this (and we're certainly not done covering them here as historical touchpoints / impacts), but this was their first genuine milestone. Just as crucially, I Need U also introduced lore to BTS: pretty boys looking sad, paired off in neat shippable duos, with grandiose imagery of fire and water and pain and a vague sense of a plot following seven boys that were happy together and unbearably sad alone, driven to the point of implied suicide. Following a VCR titled Prologue in August 2015, Run, released in November 2015 as the second installment of the HYYH series, introduced a time travel / alternate universe element that had the fandom discuss possibilities for days on end. That sealed the deal. What this registered as to other entertainment labels was: do the lore, show the boys soft, get the girls talking, and fast. (BTS would pull this same trick many, many times after HYYH was “done”.)
One of the obviously I Need U / Run-inspired music videos of the time was GOT7's Fly music video, released in March 2016. In it, Jinyoung attempts suicide by jumping off a building and remembers all the great things with his other beloved members while flying down. (Terrible song and music video. This wouldn't be the last time GOT7 followed BTS's footsteps closely — Hard Carry is a cousin of BTS's Fire.) The other, and better one, was Monsta X's lead single to their third EP: All In. Kicking off a trilogy on their own named The Clan, All In also follows a storyline that ostensibly looks like BTS's: boys looking sad, paired off in neat shippable duos, with grandiose imagery of fire and smoke and flowers. There's even a bathtub and a prominent usage of dark blue not dissimilar to BTS's Run MV. However, where Run was more about the group preserving together and falling apart when alone, All In is decidedly more romantic. As the story of the music video goes, Hyungwon and Minhyuk are two friends of a gang of boys that seem downtrodden and ready to look for trouble with local authority. When Hyungwon's father beats him up because of it — so much so that Hyungwon has to walk around in a mask of shame — Minhyuk is there to comfort him. In an especially tender moment, Minhyuk pulls away the mask only to reveal the (conveniently not too ugly) bruises on Hyungwon. But the brief respite that Hyungwon receives — inhaling blue flower smoke with close friends (the rest of Monsta X) in a laboratory tucked away — is not enough, and Minhyuk finds Hyungwon dead in a bathtub. Minyhuk pours the same drug that they had inhaled not too long ago into the bathtub and enters it, and they die holding hands. Police take away Hyungwon's father, Shownu burns the package of money they received from dealing drugs (and then, also kills himself), Kihyun walks with a broken leg, and the other Monsta X members watch as the house burns down, everything lost. (I’m going to ignore the strange alien that appears at the end for the sake of narrative consistency.) It's an atmospheric, moody piece, and melodically, All In is more muted than other title tracks of Monsta X’s are or will be. The percussion is slow, but insistent in the chorus, letting the vocals soar and plead as they declare I will bet my whole life on you. (It's vaguely amusing to hear a line go other women are no thanks, no thanks in the music video, though.) Sure, there's still a hint of blunt synths throughout, but there's no big climax in the chorus, and even Kihyun's power note is tucked to the bridge. Such emotional maturity in the songwriting, Monsta X wouldn't go back to until years later.
This EP, The Clan pt. 1 <Lost>, at least begins strong before ultimately fizzling out. Ex-Girl features Mamamoo's Wheein — at the time, Mamamoo enjoyed their first rush of popularity following their first full-length Um Oh Ah Yeh — and the easy listening of this track has stronger production value than previous B-side releases. The other is Stuck, which is the stereotypical Monsta X track following loud electronic backings, dramatic vocals, and the raps leading to the big Kihyun-led chorus. Like Hero, got a music video and was promoted. I may undersell it here, because this song is still great — Shownu in the prechorus is just the right balance between dramatic and forceful, then Kihyun's single fleeting line and Wonho sealing the deal with his nasal voice, it's a bit I was obsessed with at nineteen and still admire even now. Ultimately, between All In and Stuck, Monsta X would expand on the latter's musical ideas more than the former. But that makes All In all the more remarkable.
The Clan Pt. 2 <Guilty>
The sequel of Lost came out in October and bore the title Guilty. If you thought that this title meant that Monsta X would continue exploring the semi-decent attempt at homosexuality that they set themselves out to in All In — no. I don't know what the Fighter music video is about, and Hyungwon and Minhyuk aren't together in this one, either. But there's a bunch of cool moments of Wonho, who gets to weld with his arm muscles nicely out (same with Shownu, who dances really well, but Wonho has a better hairstyle and isn't shrouded in shadows, why lie), and the Stranger Things-inspired title drop is cool. The song is not dramatic and moody. It's celebratory in the same way winning an arduous fight is: the horns may go off, but the vocals are kind of restrained, almost close to talking in the chorus, and with the lyrics on trying to preservere and whatnot, the mood is certainly consistent. But we went from I'll bet my all on you to I'm a champion, so... suffice to say this is less a sequel and more a detour. I was never hot on this song. In the long term, the rock inklings prove an interesting prototype for what was about to come. In the short term, Guilty came with the strongest set of B-sides yet.
Right after Fighter comes Be Quiet, a song that drops its electronic farts ten seconds into the song. Those synths take real estate in the chorus, but what is so enjoyable on the song is the prechorus bit that leads up to the release with the interplay between Shownu and Kihyun. There's glass breaking in there. At some point Jooheon goes, bitch please, which makes me laugh to this day. Most of the song is built around this gyro drop, always climbing up just to fall again. And at the end there's a chanting bit that is obviously a tip of the hat to Bang Bang Bang and its ilk. In any case, this is noise that sounds good — nobody is quiet in here. Queen is also noisy but more in the Stuck way (I.M's declaration of I be your king and baby you be my queen is very fiery here). There's danger in here sonically, with a pinging not unlike a submarine's sonar radar throughout. If you're looking for Wonho here, he's near-unrecognizable in the song, tucked in the second verse. White Love (the Korean says "White Girl") is a song for the fans, all acoustic guitars, and Roller Coaster is a cute little bit employing twinkling synths and a generally brighter palette, very enjoyable and a strong closer. There's one song I didn't mention here. It places in the middle of the EP, right after Be Quiet. It's also by the guy that made the DOA song Rush, Giriboy. I promise you... nothing prepares you for the instant tonal whiplash from Be Quiet to a sex jam, Blind. When I say sex jam, please don't think of the babymaking songs that Sade got in their discography. K-Pop doesn't really have that. But the prechorus goes She go low, I go up... so... you know. In Blind, the synths pulsate. The vocals lilt, almost prowl - it's strange to hear Kihyun of all people take a strained note here. (Wonho, again, totally in his element here.) For the chorus the production bursts a little, but not too much so as to alienate the mood. There's raps, but nobody is fiery; Jooheon and I.M are both slow, almost taunting. Show me your world, the members croon in Korean at the end. All of Guilty is strong, but Blind was the song to beat. For two years it would be the Monsta X b-side for fans.
The Clan pt. 2.5 <Beautiful>
The first full-length album is nothing to scoff at in the Korean pop music world — it means the entertainment label thinks the group is worth the financial investment for such endeavors. Albums cost money, and they're not going to sell by themselves, do they? So to cap off the trilogy of The Clan, which at this point has nothing to do with any kind of clan, Monsta X released their first full-length record a year after the whole endeavor began. That two and a half in the name befuddles me, because this isn't half-anything. Beautiful, the album, is made up of new songs, and is a generally strong effort (and its deluxe, with lead single Shine Forever, is alright, too). Beautiful, the title track, makes for a good final, pulling from some ideas of the Guilty EP. The bubbles and squeaks in the beginning (a watered-down variant on SOPHIE's ideas) coupled with the rapidfire snaps and scratches sound like a rush to the head. Jooheon and I.M go back to back on the song, and the dizzying speed of their raps makes for such a satisfying start that Shownu's part in the prechorus feels like you are pulled away from things forcibly. The first thirty-seven seconds of the song though... I was crazy over it six years ago. I'd loop the song over and over again just to get to the start. The rest of the song is fine, mostly electronic, with the members floating the song with ease — Hyungwon in particular has the coolest bit, you are so pretty, he sings in Korean, so beautiful it makes me sad - too beautiful to handle in English to emphasize the point. There is a wistfulness to his baritone vocals that really sells the idea of the song. The horns after the chorus are kind of lame, though. Where's the snaps!
The music video here is a concept Monsta X would return to again and again. Seven members are in their own sets and different colors, looking simply stunning. The members dance together, which looks cool, especially when jackets are taken off. Shownu dunks something on a flower here that is a nod to All In, but that's it with the references. Jooheon walks through a corridor that recalls EXO's Lucky One music video. The other six members are locked in and then get out. Point is, they look great, especially Hyungwon.
The rest of the album is quite strong. Ready Or Not opens the album and employs cool pan pipes in the prechorus. Calm Down is loud in the Be Quiet way. I Miss You is searching and uses tropical pop tropes that were popular at the time. All I Do is a snippy, bright pop piece, and 5:14 (Last Page) a very gentle, slightly nostalgic-tinged song for the fans. But tucked in all these songs is Wonho's first writing and composing credits: Oi (not the Japanese oi, but more like O-I, which goes like: O-I O-I O-I eh in the chorus) is fast-paced, loud, with a synth that slithers in the chorus. The verses are more drawn back. Everything leads to the chorus, which is par of the course for a lot of Monsta X B-sides. Nothing that this song does reasonably suggests anything that Wonho will touch on, though, which is hilarious to me. (I'll Be There, which is the other song where Wonho has both songwriting and composition credits, is closer to his style, if a bit light on musical greatness.) It reminds me a lot of the late Jonghyun's first songwriting credit for SHINee, which was Up & Down on the 2010 record Lucifer. Regardless, Oi is a lot of fun and looks great on Wonho's songwriting credit list.
Newton
Product placement songs and K-Pop go hand in hand. (Cynics may say K-Pop is already advertisement, and this is true to an extent, but really so is just about everything under capitalism) Some of the best K-Pop songs of all time are product placements: SNSD's glitchy Visual Dream and NCT 127's clubby Save. For Lipton Ice Tea, Monsta X released Newton, billed as a "special summer single". The song is a total outlier in their discography — it's bright and summery, utilizing synths that soar in the chorus. (The rap is not, which makes the song at once more familiar and worse.) The treat here is Shownu's vocals in the prechorus and the chorus, his baritone making the song more interesting than it really is. The most interesting part of this song is its shelf life — in May 2020, this song was used in the K-Drama Tale of the Nine Taled, to the surprise of Korean and international fans alike. Imagine Newton being your first Monsta X song.
The Code
So far, we're only two years and a couple months into Monsta X's discography. Of eight. It's a lot of music — Monsta X never rested, and there will come a period where they have new music every month or so. This is not standard by any means, not even for boygroups, but it goes to show that Monsta X weren't a household name and desperately needed to be. It also goes to show that the way to stick around in this Korean pop industry is to never let people forget that you're around. The Code makes for a good capping off point for this first part, because lead single Dramarama is what got Monsta X their coveted first win on a music show - The Show, the same show BTS won two years earlier. For Monsta X, it was two years and a couple months since their debut, and that, for K-Pop standards, is quite the long time to wait. Monsta X persevered all the way until that point. Also, despite The Code being part of a duology, one thing about Monsta X is that continuity means detour more often than not, so this milestone completes the early era nicely.
Part of the reason why Monsta X had to bide their time for this long was because it was hard to stand out. 2015 to 2017 boasted some of the strongest K-Pop has ever been - not only that, certain debuts utterly eclipsed all the other rookies (NCT 127, Blackpink, and the Produce series spawning IOI and Wanna One). BTS was on the rise with music that was not too far off from what Monsta X did. Another part boils down to shifting trends and target audiences - but really, at the end of the day, luck is always part of the reason somebody succeeds and another fails. Just to give some context, 2017 was also the year Brave Girls' Rollin was released - firmly in the tropical pop trends of the time, it gained a sudden stream a whopping four years later. Dramarama was not tropical pop. It actually paid off an inherent promise Monsta X's music gave: that with all the noise made, they might as well dip into rock music. (This was a promise that Block B fulfilled in 2012 already. Monsta X would dip further into rock in their later years.) Dramarama's main conceit is the bass that appears pretty early into the song, and paired with its loud snare/kick combination, the song communicates a cool distance. Things don't change for the chorus, either, turning the song to a consistent plane... almost, though, because there comes the bridge and I.M and Jooheon trade off verses with Kihyun shouting in the background. And then we're back to the chorus and the bass and the snaps. Dramarama isn't fully rock, and it isn't a complete reinvention. But it brought about a new idea, and the a capella bit of Dramama ramama ramama hey, dramama ramama ramama hey in the beginning made for a sticky hook.
The music video, which is frankly more off-the-wall batshit dramatic than any point of the song (barring the climax, maybe), once again introduces lore that Monsta X would return to time and time again. But unlike BTS — who were more than content with tying Blood, Sweat, and Tears that also came out in the same time period as Dramarama back to the HYYH lore — Dramarama introduces a new story and an element I'm personally always excited about: that of time travel and time loops. We begin the story with the text Time Traveler Skips Town! on a newspaper. Barista Minhyuk goes about his day, Wonho admires a watch in the year 2047 while a female voice intones, Do not take any personal watches, and Kihyun is dismayed at his job — always thinking of his friend Jooheon. Things change, though, when Kihyun receives a wristwatch from a stranger. Minhyuk notices the same wristwatch left on a desk, and when he runs out to give the guest the watch back, the guest has disappeared. It's a peculiar wristwatch, quite bulky and seemingly not meant to be worn. It displays a year and has a button. Turns out it's a time machine, and the mechanics are already old hat to Wonho: he clicks his way back to his kendo friend Shownu and leaves again for... time-space constraint reasons? Melodrama? A shower scene lets the viewer know he's not happy about having to leave, and longing glances in Shownu's direction — who has no idea his friend is from the future — let us know there's something gay afoot. For Minhyuk and Kihyun, things are different. Minhyuk is cornered by Men In Black-looking guys and has to be saved by I.M - turns out they were childhood friends? The storyline is a bit vague here. Kihyun gets the biggest portion of the story. After having a great trip together, Kihyun leaves the car and waves Jooheon goodbye — Jooheon doesn't look at the road ahead, and what would you know, now the car's doing cartwheels on a perfectly straight road (just like in Infinite's The Chaser music video!) Kihyun wants to save him but there he is: Hyungwon, the man with the umbrella, who handed Kihyun the wristwatch in the first place. Having already guessed Kihyun's plan, he first gives Kihyun the chance to save Jooheon — but when that leads to the car accident in the first place, the only choice is an alternate universe in which Kihyun drives the car himself. The Men in Black zap Minhyuk away from I.M, and Wonho is taken to a chair and forcibly removed from Shownu. Hyungwon seems behind all of it. In the end, everyone is unhappy — and Kihyun dead, with Jooheon now dismayed at his job (that was Kihyun's job). Why Hyungwon has a grudge on everyone but Kihyun in particular, no idea. But one could say that Hyungwon may have been mad from a past life... one where he inhaled blue flower smoke with people that looked just like Monsta X... omg, I cracked the code! I don't watch a lot of music videos, let alone rewatch them, but Dramarama is one I really enjoy and go back to a lot.
Accompanying EP The Code is another consistently strong release that has a clear line from exciting to more quiet and back to exciting again. Highlight Tropical Night is not exactly tropical, but utilizes synths and accelerates quite nicely towards the chorus. From Zero, another strong B-side, is tropical pop music that was pervasive all over 2017's K-Pop landscape. It is also one of two B-sides of The Code that plays with the time manipulation concept (the ballad In Time is the other one). Drawing inspiration from the 2013 film About Time, Wonho's lyrics detail a protagonist regretting the way things went between him and a lover. But though they can't forget nor erase everything... he sure would like to try to reset the clock and take everything back from the start in which no mistakes could be made. For Arirang's Pops in Seoul segment, Wonho summarizes the film About Time to be about that — as if there wasn't a (shittily employed) time manipulation element in the film! But some lyrical ideas and vocal turns here are very Wonho-esque: feeling lacking in the relationship, wanting to return to an undefined happier point in time, a faint plea: come back to me, he intones in his fragile falsetto after the chorus, from zero zero zero zero. The song itself, he mentions, was meant to complement the dance it was originally conceived for, so the instrumentation takes its time here and bursts at the right places, which is after the chorus. Even then, its beat is comfortably midtempo. Originally, the song was meant to be performed by Wonho and Hyungwon, and in the concert version of this song, both vocalists float on the song's instrumentation. In the version that eventually made it on the album, the entire group sings, and the floating feel is reserved for the post-chorus that is now shared between Minhyuk and Wonho. Shownu is in the verses and pre-chorus, in total control and injecting a firm wistfulness to the song. (Kihyun, again, shows some restraint here, but then again this isn't a song to sing like a rockstar.) There's also rap sections that do what Jooheon and I.M usually do. The unit song lampshades the kind of music Wonho would go for solo, and the group song lampshades the kind of music the group would tackle... in English.
The next part will begin in the year 2018, generally considered the first year of the fourth generation of K-Pop. Amidst a changing landscape, new boygroups going down the noise path, and one group that bust open the gates to the United States, Monsta X do what they always do - but also throw in a surprise or two along the way.