Song Review:: aespa: Whiplash- Whiplash

 

• Release date: 2024 October 21

• Album tracklist: Whiplash; Kill It; Flights, Not Feelings; Pink Hoodie; Flowers; Just Another Girl

• Album runtime: 18 minutes

I've rewritten this first paragraph about four times trying to figure out how to put into words what I'm thinking without outright saying it. So, I'm just going to say it. SM is a problem. I know there are some people who are upset enough about what's going on with RIIZE that they're boycotting all SM groups because it's the only way to make SM listen. And that's fair. There are also people who don't think that the other SM groups deserve to be boycotted because it's not fair to those members and that whole RIIZE thing has nothing to do with the other groups. And that's also fair. Do I have my own (strong) opinion? Yes. But regardless of what I think, aespa has still released an album, and I am still going to review it, which is obvious since I've spent time writing this and you've spent time reading it. Thank you for that. The much longer paragraphs that were deleted talked extensively on Historicism versus Formalism schools of literary criticism in this context, so if you'd like that part, let me know and I'll be happy to jabber about it. 

In the meantime, the review awaits!

(If you're more interesting in me jabbering about the bits I really liked, rather than spending time reading about things I wasn't a huge fan of, you'll need to head down to the music video section.)

The majority of the instrumentals for this song are club EDM that does not barrel forward with aggressive energy. I did find myself doing the "eunch - eunch - eunch - eunch" hand gesture thing while I was listening to what is very much that kind of song, but the post-chorus about a minute into the song is the first time that the instrumental melody changes. And then after the post-chorus, it goes back to exactly as we heard before the post-chorus. Right before the second post-chorus, things change significantly for about five seconds which perked my ears up, before it goes right back to standard operating procedures for the song. It's incredibly repetitive, not necessarily in a bad way because it's energetic and it's a break from what has become the usual girl group sound recently, but if this was available as just an instrumental, I wouldn't listen to it.

Speaking of repetition, the post chorus. I appreciate Whiplash for the fact that there's substance and weight to the instrumentals and the vocals, but it also feels like half the song is one or more members just saying the word whiplash. I just reviewed Karina's solo UP, which I loved but hear no sign of the same kinds of vocals in this song, and I've heard excellent things about the vocals of this group in general. The only song I have actual experience with from the group is Trick or Trick, which I genuinely like a lot, and so it's a little frustrating for me that this set of songwriters didn't give the members a song that they could flex the vocals they have. I want to be clear that, especially because the members do not have writing credits on the song, I'm not blaming them for the lackluster and repetitive nature of the song. It's not their fault. But, on the bright side, this song will likely be an excellent concert song. While this isn't one that I'd necessarily choose to listen to in my free time, I imagine that the performance of it especially will be popular. I might check out one of the stages to see if I'm correct.

I promise that I actually liked the music video, but I'm going to start with my least favorite part so that I can gush over the parts I really liked at length. Personally, I didn't like the choreography, but I do think it was a necessary part of the music video. Moving on, because there has been entirely too much that frustrates/disappoints me about this song already and I'm ready to talk about things I did like, so, again, if you've made it this far despite my grumpiness over the song, thank you very much, I'll try to spend a bit of time on the good stuff. Warning: I am about to nerd out.

First up on the docket is this music video is a Soviet montage lover's dream. Quick background, there are several kinds of montages that exist and are used in cinema, even within the definition of Soviet montage (Kuleshov and Eisenstein are two of the biggest names you can look into, and they were brilliant). Modern audiences are going to be most familiar with the time-skip montage, designed to string a series of images together to convey or suggest the passage of time without spending the time to actually show the passage of time, which is functionally useful but rarely that interesting. There are some exceptions to that, two of which are the Rocky training montage and the New Moon depression montage, but generally those also fall under one of the types of the Soviet montage as well (in both cases, I'm pretty sure that they're tonal montages, but I'd need to go back and take another look at them individually to verify). If you want another excellent example of a tonal montage, the movie Parasite contains one. In this case, I'd almost argue that the music video uses the metric montage the most. The metric montage uses the soundtrack to dictate where the cuts of the film should be. You'll notice that the cuts of the music video are very fast and match the equally fast beat of the music. But that wasn't what made my brain attach to the Soviet montage; instead it was the frames of words interspersed within the scenes which made me think of propaganda, which naturally reminded me of the Soviet montage, which was one of the original reasons why the technique was developed. If you have any interest in this stuff at all, I'd highly recommend researching it. It's not used nearly enough anymore. But honestly, this is such a prime example of a metric montage that this should be studied as the textbook example, with an extra dose of the intellectual montage through the use of the text supers, most of which go fast enough that I can't consciously read them, but I know my brain is still absorbing them and taking in the message in conjunction with what is immediately preceding and succeeding them. It is genuinely fascinating and objectively brilliant.

Also, and this partially ties into the text supers part of the above, giant, montage paragraph, the use of color. The first actual bit of color we get in the first twenty seconds is the first of them in red, which says "Day 1 Know I Been Bad." I managed to pause the music video just right, which I was excited about.  But even with those text supers, this music video is largely monochromatic, and this largely makes the text supers even more noticeable. 

Thank you for bearing with me. That was long, but I'm genuinely fascinated by the music video.