Lordbordem’s Weekly Ramblings – Think Happy Thoughts, Think AOA Penguins

I confess, I’ve been a bit of a Negative Nancy over the last couple weeks. It’s not good for the olde stress levels to be a cranky old bloke for so long. To remedy this rather long period of negativity, I thought it would be nice to talk about some of the positive stuff I’ve seen over the last couple weeks and stuff that I see a lot of future potential in. This however will mean delving back into my AOA Penguin theory.

Very Important Disclaimer Stuff: The writer is not really an expert at anything much and is just a mere casual fan of pretty much everything. The writer has been known to be rather weird and cynical at times. The writer’s opinions certainly DO NOT reflect the opinion of Soompi’s news team or Soompi as a whole. Trust me, the rest of the team is quite normal.

Mark My Word, AOA Will Be the Next Big Thing

About two weeks ago, I proposed my grand “General Theory of AOA Penguin-ness” and almost immediately it was swiftly ignored for the nonsense that it truly is. Yet I would like to bring this topic up again without the Penguin stuff. I’m bringing this topic up again because I genuinely believe that AOA has the potential to be one of the top-tier mid-level girl groups within the next year. 

Confession time: Up until a few weeks ago, I thought absolutely nothing of AOA. I knew they sort of existed, but I completely ignored them. Initial impressions were that they were just your average girl group with no particular stand out traits or characteristics. It also didn’t help that they debuted in 2012, a period when I was too busy being a hipster and listening to old folk songs. On top of that, they were from an agency (FNC Entertainment) that I hardly ever paid any attention to. Nail in the coffin was that their debut song “Elvis” was all sorts of weird but not in the good way.

You may then ask why I’m wasting my breath talking about AOA if I had such a low opinion of them. Well, a couple things happened in the last year to change my perception of them. First off, I happened to watch “Cheongdam-dong 111.” For those who don’t know what that show is, it’s a reality show based around the events that happen within FNC Entertainment. The only reason I even ended up looking for the show was because there was this fairly popular set of pictures from the show.

The pictures are from the scene where AOA Leader Ji Min is told that she has been paid for the lyrics that she wrote.  Ji Min then went around talking about all the things she would buy with her new found “fortune” which then ends in sadness once she finds out she received a massive sum of $1~ish. That was enough to pique my curiosity, so I went and watched the whole show. I tend to judge a lot of celebrities by how well they do on variety shows, and AOA seemed to be fairly interesting to watch in this instances.

They then appeared on “Weekly Idol” and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. They have so far been the most enjoyable guest to watch in 2014. They had the right mix of individual personality, wit, and humor, especially for a group of rookies with little variety show experience. It also helped that Ji Min was pretty amazing during this episode with her ability to mingle with the MCs and to get the maximum out of her other members.

But! You say! They are meant to be a group of singers and we should judge them on their singing abilities. Well that’s not much of an issue. AOA Black’s “Moya” was a great song and something that could only really have come out of FNC Entertainment.

There is also the various acoustic versions of their other songs scattered around Youtube and most of them show off a rather talented group of core singers. They definitely seem to have the singing talent, which unfortunately has taken a bit of back seat as they pursue more aggressive “sexy” concepts to increase their exposure. 

In either case, I really expect to see AOA become as popular, if not more, than Girls’ Day by the end of the year. I have a fairly good success rate with these predictions. I correctly predicted 3 out of 4 grand award winners during last year’s end of year award ceremonies and around two years ago, I predicted/wished that Girls’ Day will become a much more popular group.

Of course I could easily be completely wrong as well, in which case, I’m going to become very cranky again and I don’t like being cranky (tl;dr Please support AOA more, I beg of you~).

Some Other Great Stuff

I’ll keep this short because I’m already pushing my word limit and I can already sense my dear lovely editor, CallMeN00NA, getting ever so slightly annoyed at me. 

Regardless of what I’ve said about the type of songs coming out of the industry over the last couple months, you can’t fault the sheer quantity of songs coming out. 2014 has really gotten off to a great start in that respect. It’s only March and we’ve already seen releases from Girls Day, Dalshabet, BTOB, CN Blue, Girls Generation, 2NE1, Ladies Code and there is also upcoming songs from groups like Orange Caramel and INFINITE. Then there is also the song I posted below.

Hyperbole it may be, but I think “Peppermint Chocolate” by Mamamoo and K-Will is one of the best songs of the year so far. I never expected K-Will’s voice to work so well for such a fast tempo song. Mamamoo also seems to be a great up and coming rookie group. Their first song, “Don’t Be Happy,” was a rather great little jazzy song, and “Peppermint Chocolate” takes the group in a different tangent again. If you haven’t heard this song yet then I strongly encourage you to have a listen. Girls Generation and 2NE1 can wait a couple minutes. 

*Lordbordem is the multi award winner in the grand national Koala fighting championships. He also writes the occasional articles on Soompi to help with Koala shock. 9 out of 10 doctors and readers now regards this to be a bad decision.