Potpourri: NCT 127 (rundown and closing thoughts)
The final part includes yet another section on "Love on the Floor" and some personal reflections.
This is part four and the last part of the NCT 127 Potpourri. Like with Monsta X before, this final part is a tl;dr.
Rundown
Give me ten songs that I should listen to
This is a variety of slower tracks, louder songs, and their electronic side. And the R&B charmer “Elevator (127F)”, of course. Above all, this is me doing the list, and I think if you’ve made it this far, you must have a good idea of my tastes.
Cherry Bomb (Cherry Bomb) — in fact, I think this should be your first NCT 127 song if you’ve never heard them before. If you get it then, try your hand with the other titles — if not, there’s the B-side catalogue.
Limitless (Limitless) — and this is the one other title you should hear. There’s a good number of other NCT 127 title track candidates you could get to — I had “Ay-Yo” on here — but Limitless has the SM songwriting all over it in a way “Cherry Bomb” or even “Ay-Yo” and “Simon Says” don’t, and I think there’s value in seeing how even at their most “standard”, the group clearly operates best with a vague hint of the villainous.
Love on the Floor (Favorite)
Sun & Moon (Cherry Bomb)
Promise You (Sticker/Favorite)
Time Lapse (2 Baddies/Ay-Yo)
Switch (NCT #127)
Save (Save)
Lipstick (LOVEHOLIC)
Elevator (127F) (Neo Zone / Neo Zone The Final Round)
One?
Cherry Bomb.
One B-side.
Love on the Floor.
Okay, so there’s a couple reasons for this one. 1) I like big dance tracks. 2) I have been wowed by big dance tracks so many times in my life my default assumption is that so do most people my age (sorry if that’s not you). 3) It’s a fan favorite, and not to indulge in ad populum fallacies, but sometimes the populum happens to be right.
Give me one album/EP I should listen to
Sticker, and I know I go a bit against the grain with that opinion, but it’s the one that feels the fullest. EP — Cherry Bomb, this one is a no-brainer.
What’s the NCT 127 song you listened to most often?
Kick It and it’s not even close. From the B-sides, “Lemonade” followed by “Earthquake”.
I want to start listening to their discography too. Where should I start?
From the start. That’s the only way NCT 127 makes sense, and NCT #127 is an immensely enjoyable EP. The Japanese releases are good too, don’t skip out on them!
As for the solos/subunits/units, Taeyong’s Soundcloud is pretty fun, and his Shalala EP as well as DOJAEJUNG’s Perfume are both among the best K-Pop releases of the year.
Would you recommend their discography?
I actually would, yes! Even if you’re not into K-Pop, there’s so much to NCT 127’s discography that it would make a solid entry point on top of it being a plain fun listen through.
Closing remarks
Doyoung has the best voice in all of K-Pop. In case it wasn’t clear how many times I highlighted him over the album reviews… wow, listening to NCT 127 for over three months really solidified it. Nobody sounds really like him.
I’m also in love with this mashup of Lim Chang Jung’s Love Again and Sticker. It’s immaculate. The best part is also my bio for a while now: 사랑. (훠우! 훠우!)
Its absurdity is up there with the grandiosity of a group that thinks they’re the ones that make the clocks tick, as in: “Clock is ticking, how we do that” — no, it isn’t them quizzing us how NCT 127 is doing that, although it could also be that. I always took it to mean that they’re so big, god-like, that they control time. It compels me. I say we let them. Don’t tell me how you make the clocks tick.
With Monsta X last March, I could play pretend. I could pretend like my first touching point with that group was “Hero” (and it was), that I was there every single time after that (I wasn’t), and that I had positive feelings towards them (I didn’t and I am not ashamed to admit it was likely due to Twitter influencing me). I checked out at some point and returned with “Who Do U Love?”, a song so brilliant it was enough to appropriately feel devastated when Wonho — an idol I very much did not care for for at eighteen, then hilariously did start to appreciate later — left the group during “Follow” promotions, another lead single I thought was brilliant. For me to play pretend with NCT 127, i.e to be serious and not be a fan writing a retrospective worthy of their career, I had to remove myself until it was appropriate (you’ll notice this happen with “Punch” when I bring up the Twitter reactions, which is four years into their career).
Fact of the matter was, I hated “The 7th Sense” when it first came out. I thought it was a terrible song. I thought that certain members sounded like idols I already didn’t care about, now amplified because the song left no room for other events, so sparse is the production. The controversies. I heard the song again recently, for this Potpourri. I don’t hate it anymore, but still thought it undercooked. But Taeyong’s verse, that hook of “we’ll take… it slow…” of Doyoung and Taeyong, has stuck with me for seven long years.
Then there was the fact that NCT was an insanity project — like a passion project, only, well, objectively insane on Lee Soo-man’s part — that NCT 127 seemingly never fled from: though I changed my mind on NCT 127 a year after “The Seventh Sense”, with “Cherry Bomb”, The NCT Album came out in 2018, and I realized caring about NCT 127 meant caring about all these other units. It frightened and annoyed me in equal measure. It was like the Middle Eastern idea of marriage — you don’t marry one person, it’s two families marrying — in a musical version, and I bristled against it. So for a long time, I didn’t care what NCT 127 was up to… until I had to, in 2020, when seemingly my entire timeline enjoyed Neo Zone. I didn’t care for the album; it wasn’t my way of keeping up with K-Pop then. But I returned to “Kick It” despite my first lukewarm impression, over and over… and then I found I kept up with their new titles, and didn’t I know the names of the members, and wasn’t Jaehyun — a member I never understood the hype for — actually… quite attractive, and his timbre interesting?
What you feel about a musical act isn’t “just” your musical preference, and never is. It’s about what the people around you think, the state of mind you are in at a time. It’s the fickle nature of opinion that makes music criticism, like all forms of art criticism, both difficult and worthwhile. Two years ago, I’d have scoffed at myself for writing over 15k words on this group. Now, I think of the friends I made, and the trove of music I enjoyed, thanks to NCT 127. And, it pleases me to say, NCT group releases are no longer seen with the same relevance as they did five years ago. I feel vindicated!
When I say that NCT 127 endbosses, I really do mean it — not just in my own listening journey, but in K-Pop writ large. Over the course of seven years, every boygroup did a NCT 127 song. Don’t believe me? From SM: “Obsession”, “Don’t Call Me”, “Step Back” all rely on DemJointz, who had never been utilized as a master of noisy hip hop music before “Cherry Bomb”. Outside of SM: “God’s Menu”. “Maverick”. “Bouncy (K-Hot Chili Peppers)” — all these sounds, NCT 127 flaunted with in their title tracks one way or another. They were ahead of the curve, and, at this point, doing avant-garde music is no longer necessary to still be the guiding light for a great many boygroups. I think that’s an interesting spot to be at career-wise, and as they branch out and add to the idea of what NCT 127 could sound like (Taeyong: the leads; DOJAEJUNG: the B-sides), the group will surely take the graceful leap to the pantheon in K-Pop discographies. Though quite honestly, even if they were to disband today, they’d be there already. Even if their entire discography just boiled down on “Sticker” — indeed their best song — they’d be at the very top.
Where is K-Pop going to be headed from here on out? Will there be a change up, and if so, what — not when — will cause the changing of the guards? Perhaps such questions are futile with a genre as insular and copy-happy as K-Pop is. Perhaps there will never be a changing of the guards, or not in the way that was clearly the case a decade ago. Perhaps the changing of the guards has happened: people look at the new Mnet boygroup ZeroBaseOne and don’t consider what NCT 127 members they should be or what songs of theirs sing (though many of them did cover “Kick It” for the show Boys Planet 999); NCT DoJaeJung, a subunit of Doyoung, Jaehyun, and Jungwoo, shows a path towards the collective desire to relive the Y2K we all imagine must’ve happened from its glossiest pages. But seven years is an impressively long time, and NCT 127 pushed to the very ends of what’s accepted as K-Pop music. In doing so, they’ve carved out a space in which a song can be perceived as anything from the greatest music ever made to absolute turd, two extremes that many K-Pop songs outright avoid lest it rise above the lowest common denominator (and maximum profit). They’ve carved a space in which hip-hop and electronic music doesn’t have to stand at odds with each other in K-Pop, music in which more is more. It’ll take years before this sound trickles down to acceptable, safe levels. Eventually, DemJointz will be written in K-Pop annals like producers before him; Yoo Youngjin, who already sits on those annals, has already become a villain for not “featuring vocalists enough” in some corners of Twitter. The changing of the guard is underway, and it’ll be a slow, arduous process to witness. Until then, NCT 127 will stand ahead, the trailblazers that left nothing behind (not even ashes), the bar to clear. The future will become present when NCT 127 sounds dated. For now, that world seems as distant as a nightmare.