The Prophet Blog

The other day I only half-seriously named T-ara as the most exciting and creative group in K-Pop, but I should have saved that title for the mixed-gender quintet Sunny Hill.

Since leaving Nega Network for LOEN Entertainment, Sunny Hill have transformed themselves into one of the most interesting pop acts on the planet. From the twisted “Midnight Circus” and its accompanying mini-album to the horror-ballad “Pray”, everything that Sunny Hill did last year was virtually perfect.

I really hate to use the ‘A’ word since Lady GaGa bastardized it, but in this case, I must: Sunny Hill don’t just make pop music; they make art.

The group returned last week with their latest single “The Grasshopper Song”, but don’t let the kooky title put you off — this is the group’s best work to date.

“The Grasshopper Song” is a fresh interpretation of the old fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. The original tale is about a group of hardworking ants who are stockpiling food in the spring in preparation for the cold winter months; as they toil away, a grasshopper acquaintance of theirs spends his time playing music and having fun, ignoring the ants when they warn him to buckle down and start finding food before it’s too late. Eventually winter rolls around and the fields are frozen, leaving the grasshopper to beg the ants for nourishment to save his life — they decline, and he dies. The moral of the story is the value of hard work.

But Sunny Hill have delivered a vastly different take on the classic tale. In Sunny Hill’s version, working life is presented as a soul-destroying rat race, stifling one’s spirit with the meaningless monotony that usually comes with a 9-to-5 job. The grasshopper is no longer seen as a lazy vagabond, but a rebellious symbol of freedom for going against the system and being able to survive and find fulfillment outside of the regulated norm. It may not be entirely practical in the real world to give a big F-U to ‘the man’ in exchange for a life of busking and unemployment, but there’s a lesson to be learned from “The Grasshopper Song” about anti-conformity and the pursuit of happiness within the regimented system that sadly, happens to be real life.

The message makes even more sense in the sphere of South Korea, which not only boasts one of the world’s largest-economies, but is also the hardest-working nation in the world, with the most working hours of any industrialized country. Working from 8am to 9pm, 6 days a week is not uncommon, with most workers only afforded 10 vacation days per year. With so little time available for a personal life, it’s no wonder that South Korea also has the second-highest suicide rates on the planet.

Sunny Hill’s “The Grasshopper Song” is much more than a children’s fable turned into a K-Pop song espousing the virtues of individuality and self-expression like so many countless factory-line top forty tracks in the past two years have done — it’s a shockingly original commentary on South Korean society set to a soundtrack of whimsical K-Pop, and to use an old fable to make this kind of statement is rather ingenious.

Once again, the team of Lee Min Soo and Kim Eana are behind “The Grasshopper Song”, serving up another one of their trademark orchestral quirk-pop hits that they’ve been churning out for the likes of the Brown Eyed Girls, IU, and even Sunny Hill themselves for the past year or so. The song is essentially told from the perspective of the grasshopper, after he (actually, she in this video) is expected to either die or beg for food like in the original story. However, the grasshopper has other plans, using music to show the worker ants that a little fun off the job won’t kill them, which in turn becomes “The Grasshopper Song”.

As with all of Lee Min Soo and Kim Eana’s productions, the composition here is rather complex. It opens with some grungy acoustics, before woeful strings slide in with a crunchy dance beat underneath. The verses are delivered in rapid-fire spits by the ‘ants’ to capture the claustrophobic nature of the 9-to-5 grind, while the hook is a simple but sweet ditty of “ring-a-ring-a-ring” sung by the grasshopper. Sunny Hill’s sole male member Jang Hyun finally gets a small chance to shine for once, playing the role of a workaholic ant that realizes he’s squandered his life in the office (so to speak), finally breaking down on the song’s bridge for a short autotuned verse about hamster wheels and wasted time.

Everything from the speed of the delivery to the vocal effects has been carefully thought-out and constructed here — there isn’t one part of “The Grasshopper Song” that doesn’t contain some underlining meaning that’s ripe and ready to be analyzed and dissected.

Just like they preach in the song, Sunny Hill have gone against the grain and marched to the beat of LOEN’s their own drum. Artists of this rare breed are so important right now, not just for K-Pop, but for pop music in general: they set an example for the rest of the world and show that there’s still room to be wildly creative and unique within what is often a frivolous genre. Just like any other style of music, pop can have depth and be original and challenge the listener, as Sunny Hill and their former labelmates the Brown Eyed Girls have proven.

Alongside BEG, Sunny Hill are a perfect example of just how rich and exciting pop music can really be when done right. With the group’s rising popularity and LOEN’s rapid growth, hopefully this is only the beginning of a new pop movement.

Score: 4.5/5