look, it was either this or a comprehensive intro to ALL THE GIRL GROUPS IN KPOP. lesser evils.
I have been referring to this project as my "SNSD pimp post" and I guess it is... technically that. But to be honest it's more like my excuse to write meta-y odes to the various SNSD members. Full-on rpf fandom is still kind of weird to me, I don't know that it will ever not be. But one of my favorite things to do in fictional fandoms is to knit together vague clues into some kind of mental tapestry, and (for me) kpop is ALL THAT ALL THE TIME. And that is the genesis of this, I suppose.
(if you are like me and can usually immediately be like "I AM FOND OF THAT ONE!!" based on adorable facial expression alone, here are these photos membermapped so you can know which one you are fond of)
the basics
SNSD is a South Korean pop group made up of nine girls! They are kind of lame but mostly just super adorable. That is really all you need to know.
The name 소녀시대 (So Nyuh Shi Dae) comes from a Lee Seung Cheol song released in 1989 (...I think), which was later covered and released by the girls. For ~official purposes~ their english name is "Girls' Generation", but in English they mostly get called by the acronym SNSD, though, although at times you may see them called Soshi.
They debuted in August 2007, and their run of late 2007/early 2008 singles was met with pretty modest success, which was not entirely unexpected because historically in kpop, the boy bands were the cash cows. In 2008 they laid low for nine months and didn't release any new songs, possibly because that was the year a bunch of boy band fans decided they hated them forever, but also possibly just because they didn't feel like coming out with any new stuff. But at the beginning of 2009 they came out with the song "Gee", which was kind of a big deal. It is sort of the flagship song of the korean wave, an earworm of the highest order. It won all the awards, most of them many times over. And it catapulted SNSD from a random, almost-relevant girl group to #1. A lot of people called 2009 the year of Soshi, but with three korean hits and a ridiculously, implausibly successful Japanese debut, 2010 was just as much theirs. 2011 could easily be the same, there are rumors that they're going to hit Europe -- which is unprecedented in kpop -- and lately it seems like the company is putting out feelers in Los Angeles as well, they seem to be pushing the world domination angle.
Idoldom is messy though, and especially so for nine girls at the peak of their fame in a relatively conservative culture like South Korea's. They are simultaneously objectified and sexualized by one demographic and expected to be exemplars for another. A lot of their image is based on the idea of them as your perfect pliable imaginary girlfriend, and things like the music video for "Genie" (which comes off like a dating simulation) and the lyrics of "Oh!" (I LOVE YOU OPPA) emphasize this and KIND OF REALLY CREEP ME OUT, if I think too much about it. Even for their "fiercer" concepts they (or the company, really) are unwilling to sacrifice that image, in the story version of Run Devil Run, cheerleader!SNSD triumphs over sexy-scary-spacey!SNSD. And their "cute" concepts like Oh!/Gee have seen greater commercial success, so they are probably here to stay.
("The company", btw, is SM Entertainment, one of the "big three" entertainment companies in South Korea. They like making money and overworking their celebrities, just like every other entertainment company in South Korea.)
Anyway here is the thing: they are superstars, but they are also just girls (or women, really, now.) Intelligent girls who can be (and have been) critical of what they do even as they love it. Girls who love and support each other, but also love making fun of each other on television. Talented girls, no matter what anyone says. Who sing catchy-as-shit bubblegum pop music.
Anyway I love them all forever, and here is my TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY BIASED POST DEDICATED TO WHY.
the music (videos)
If you can't be bothered to slog through all of this, must-sees are marked with a *.
THE SINGLES
Mr. Taxi, a waste of 3 minutes of my life, tbh (December 2011)
The Boys (October 2011)
훗 (Hoot)* (October 2010)
Run Devil Run* (March 2010)
Oh! (January 2010)
소원을말해봐 (Genie) (June 2009)
Gee* (January 2009)
Baby Baby, although in some ways I feel like this belongs down with the misc music videos, it's a lot more in line with Way to Go/Snowy Wish than any of these up here. But Baby Baby was an officially promoted song and those two were not, SO! (March 2008)
Kissing You (January 2008)
소녀시대 (Girls' Generation) (November 2007)
다시 만난 세계 (Into the New World)* (August 2007)
JAPANESE SINGLES
Paparazzi* (June 2012)
Time Machine* (March 2012)
Bad Girl (August 2011), okay so not technically a single so much as a bonus album MV, just roll with it
Mr. Taxi* (April 2011)
Run Devil Run (April 2011)
Gee (September 2010)
Genie* (August 2010)
SUBGROUP RELEASES
Twinkle (April 2012)
오빠 나빠 (March 2008)
MISC MUSIC VIDEOS (MOSTLY COMMERCIALS)
Echo (July 2011)
Run Devil Run 3D Ver. ...lol (July 2011)
Visual Dreams, ughhhhhh WHY (January 2011)
첫눈에(Snowy Wish) (December 2010)
Genie 3D Ver., might be the greatest Genie MV if it were not full of disgustingly overzealous hair extensions (October 2010)
Cabi Song, MUTE IT AND PUT SOME OTHER SONG ON, I AM WARNING YOU NOW (May 2010)
Hey Cooky (April 2010)
Seoul*, aka the greatest music video (five members of) SNSD has/have ever participated in, possibly because it is the only one that has ever had a story (December 2009)
Chocolate Love* (October 2010)
HaHaHa (April 2009)
힘내! (Way To Go)* (January 2009)
Mabinogi (It's Fantastic) (December 2008)
the girls
SEOHYUN
Real Name: Seo JooHyun
Birthdate: June 28, 1991 (19)
Good at: Singing AND Dancing (IMAGINE THAT)
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 6 years and 6 months (so she started at age 10)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Music, Piano, Singing, Chinese
There are all these... things attached to being the youngest, or the "maknae" of a group, I don't know how to explain it, except to say that discussion of you is frequently tied to discussion of you as compared to what a "maknae" usually is or should be: cute, innocent, simultaneously everyone's bitch (although I think that's more with the dude groups) and everyone's baby. In a lot of ways Seohyun fits that better than a lot of maknaes do (but in other ways she doesn't). She was sixteen when the group debuted, but in their early shows she acts all of eleven, calling out for her mom when she gets scared at the amusement park, getting absurd amounts of joy out of her favorite cartoon Keroro (this is not Futurama, btw, it is actually a cartoon aimed at children, and yet here Seobb is in her late teens, holding her Keroro pillow and carrying her Keroro purse, dragging the older members with her to watch it get dubbed). She is so innocent that she projects it, it falls off her in waves. And it makes sense -- here is an only child, who displays all the behaviors of a girl who was coddled by both parents (I love Seohyun's mother by proxy, you hear her in so many of Seohyun's proclamations: "you can achieve anything you set your mind to" "don't get married until you're sure it won't tie you down" "the best gift I can give my parents is to be the best person I can be"; any woman who can raise her daughter to so earnestly believe all of those things is A HERO FOR OUR TIMES), who started training to be a celebrity at a very young age, and debuted at sixteen, and has since lived in a dorm with her eight inherited big sisters, who tease her but also dote on her. Relatedly until recently she had a reputation for hating boys. Possibly because she rarely interacted with them, possibly because she makes this face when they start taking off their shirts. (I say until recently because right now starring in a show called We Got Married, in which she pretends to be married to a member of a boy band. And she's nice to him. Usually.)
Seohyun is also a robot. If you train your eyes on her in almost any performance, you will usually notice she is just... HYSTERICALLY BLANK-FACED. She's a great singer and dancer, but in a sort of adorably emotionless way: and she is the worst of the nine at modeling/acting. EMOTIONS JUST AREN'T HER THING. She is also incredibly intelligent, and super dedicated to her schoolwork (she tears up at one point in Girls Go To School because people think entertainers are brainless!). She's currently in college despite her ridiculous schedule. I forget what she's studying, but she eventually wants to be a diplomat: the current UN Secretary General is her idol, which is so hysterically adorable, HOW MANY 19-YEAR-OLDS SAY THAT. Especially 19-year-old singers?! She seems to have a linguistic talent-- she is always noted as speaking Chinese in her ~offical profiles~ (although I think the only time she's done it on camera is while announcing SM global auditions so it's hard to comment on her communicative competence), her Japanese is decent (the girls say she and Sooyoung act as their Japanese teachers-- Sooyoung is definitely more fluent than Seobb, but Seobb's Japanese is pretty decently conversational, judging from her interactions with Ueno Juri on We Got Married, although I haven't yet seen her flex those linguistic muscles on an actual Japanese show), and -- this part is pure speculation -- I get the impression her English is the best of the non-Americans. Just from her pronunciation and a handful of sentences she's spoken at concerts. IDK I COULD BE WRONG THERE, but she is the best and the brightest, it's not that much of a stretch. She is the perfect daughter in a lot of ways: she does everything she's supposed to do (and more) when she's supposed to do it and then when she's done she tries to help everyone else achieve perfection. By squacking at them (BAD EATING ACCUMULATES AND EVENTUALLY YOU DIE). She is a stringently healthy eater to the degree that she is obsessed (!!!) with sweet potatoes (no, seriously) and says things like "that hamburger will kill you". She also goes to bed early (so she can regenerate skin cells properly, obviously) and wakes up early so she can read (mostly she likes self-help books! They make her a better person! In this way she is kind of a Hermione, whenever she has a problem she can't solve I think her first instinct is to FIND A BOOK ABOUT IT). She is also a great pianist -- an actually superb pianist. I feel like these ~profile~ things always stretch how good people are at things, in the sense that if you were writing one about, say, me, you would put piano down as a talent I have. And like, I could sit down and impress you with a couple of Beethoven and Tchiakovsky pieces but am I actually, genuinely good? Not really. Anyway Seobb is miles above me. MILES. Because she is perfect. And probably practices three hours every day. While she reads. And practices her Japanese. Always the good little robot.
A lot of people say that Seohyun is boring. I DON'T KNOW WHAT THOSE PEOPLE ARE SMOKING, she is the most unintentionally hysterical person in the world. Her earnestness! The seriousness with which she takes everything! Her whininess! Her bossiness! SHE BASICALLY THE GREATEST, the end.
YOONA
Real Name: Im YoonA
Birthdate: May 30, 1990 (20)
Good at: Dancing (she is also an actual actress with two dramas under her belt)
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 7 years and 2 months (so she was barely 10 when she became a trainee)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Acting, Dance
Yoona is the most popular member in a general sense (the fandom favors Taeyeon slightly, but the ~general public~ loves Yoona best) and the most overexposed in that her face is EVERYWHERE, and she is often the one who gets picked for commercial campaigns and dramas and the like (if there is only one picked). She's also the most requested for variety shows, shows up more frequently than the others as the ~girl~ in other people's music videos, gets put in the center of the choreography the most frequently, and is basically the face of the band. Kpop idols get asked about their "ideal type" a lot -- basically what celebrity do you want to bone -- and Yoona is so universally considered "perfect" that she is like, the boring answer to that question for dudes now. If you don't want to come up with someone specific, just say Yoona! And it is all because of her face. At 20, she has basically been declared the beauty standard for all of South Korea. Ugh that seems like an absurd amount of pressure to me, for someone so young.
I am sure, having read that, you know where this is going: she gets a lot of shit. A lot of it. Having a high profile leads to detractors, I suppose. Yoona is boring! Yoona is a bitch! Yoona is "fake"! Yoona cares too much about her image to be interesting! Yoona is nothing but a pretty face! Which is so sad to me, because if you pay any real attention to her -- ANY AT ALL -- she basically has the personality of an 8-year-old boy. Whatever "image" she displays to the public at large is created not by Yoona herself, but by SM Entertainment executives. Super Junior's Heechul said something about her that I just love: "The reason I’m close with Yoona: she’s definitely the prettiest girl in Korea. She’s even prettier without makeup. Although she’s pretty, she doesn’t pretend to be pretty. She’s always very bold, funny and destroys her own image. So I told her: you are pretty because you don’t pretend to be pretty."
The thing about Yoona is I don't think she wants the extra screentime. I don't think you can say that about most people in any kind of entertainment profession (and I personally don't think there's anything really wrong with wanting to be noticed or paid attention to). In the Gee days she was gone a lot, filming "Cinderella Man", and she has since talked about hating it -- hating that she was gone from the other members so much of the time, that she didn't even get to go to LA for the Hollywood Bowl with them. She also says things about wishing she could give up her face time for the less exposed members like Hyoyeon and Sooyoung. I don't know, I guess it's easier not to care about your popularity or exposure when you are the most popular one, but in a lot of ways Yoona seems genuinely uncomfortable with her notoriety. She's the quietest one of the nine in group interviews -- most of the attention she gets on variety shows happens because she is pulled out and called out and asked about. She keeps things to herself: we don't really know much about her family or where she came from -- whereas with a lot of the other members (Sooyoung especially, but also Yuri, Seohyun and kind of Tiffany) have had family members appear on television. Taeyeon's parents haven't appeared on TV (I don't think?) but their eyeglass shop is a shrine to her that fans stop by to drop gifts off to. A lot of the SNSD mothers seem like group mothers: they had one daughter, now they have eight more. I don't think Yoona's family is like that -- she likes to keep the spheres of her life separate in a way a lot of them don't. There are rumors about her mom having left her and her dad and her sister, and I'm sure that's part of why, but I also think to her keeping things separate is the best protection -- the best way to keep Im YoonA separate from YOONA. I think there's a lot of parts of her she keeps under wraps, and I do think she's learned, with time and practice, which part of her personality to show in many different situations. She's very aware of her image because she has to be, with that much attention trained on her -- and every so often she'll bring it up herself, make a joke about how she (or someone else) is ruining it. She's too important to really be able to forget that there are people watching. Which is a little bit sad, but then, once upon a time she was a ten-year-old who went to audition after audition after audition: and ten years later she's living that girl's dream.
Yoona is the name you'll see most often thrown around as "talentless", because she's not a good singer. She's really not, and she is the first to say that, the first to claim singing is her worst failing. But she's not an awful singer -- she sounds better than I would for sure -- it's just that her her voice is undeniably mediocre and she's mediocre at projecting it. She is, first and foremost, an actress -- which is kind of a funny thing to say, in a group that mostly requires singing and dancing. But her two dramas have played a huge part in her -- and therefore the group's -- popularity. She's also quite the dancer, and people forget that, mostly because she doesn't have the power or execution of Hyoyeon or the passion or energy of Yuri. IT'S HARD TO BE TIED FOR THIRD BEST. But she is good at it.
I always want to say Yoona has "more" close friendships within the group than other members do, but I don't think that's fair: they're all really close to each other and they all seem to have really close friendships among themselves. They build each other up, which I think is pretty remarkable in such a cutthroat industry. So I guess I will just say something about Yoona's friendships have always drawn my attention more than any of the others, which is funny because I think she flaunts it less, and is less prone to "fanservice" (exaggerating closeness because the fans like to ship you with your bandmembers, which is SUPER common among korean boybands and slightly less common with the girls, but def still there, especially with Soshi) than some of the others. To me Yoona seems to come in pairs, which is funny for a girl who is so often asked to stand on her own as the face of the group. But when they are all together she's always with Hyoyeon or Yuri or Seohyun or someone -- often off to the side, not in the center of the action. Sometimes she totally is in the action though, all goofy and mischevious. One of her trademarks is the fish face. She delights in annoying the other members of her band (especially Tiffany) and is constantly coming up with new ways to do it (and using the old standbys over and over again). (If that intrigues you and you ever have 30 minutes to spare, my main response to the SM town live backstage coverage was "I love Yoona so much, SHE'S SO IRRITATING". BABY SISTERS: SO GREAT. When they're not annoying you.)
SOOYOUNG
Real Name: Choi SooYoung
Birthdate: February 10, 1990 (20)
Good at: Dancing
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie (the tallest)
Duration of Training: 6 years and 3 months (so she started training at 11, although I don't totally understand because at age 12 she debuted in a jpop duo called Route0. And then I guess went back to Korea to finish her training, WHO EVEN KNOWS, I DON'T)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, Japanese, Dance, Acting
Sooyoung is hilarious. She is loud and outrageous and witty and endlessly entertaining. And more than that she is shameless: she is not afraid to be ridiculous, not afraid to go all out for that laugh, I don't think she's even afraid of the potential silence if that laughter doesn't come. BUT IT ALWAYS COMES. It's not really that she doesn't have a filter: she thinks about what she says, she just doesn't care enough to censor herself. She will tell stories about poop on television, but she will also talk point-blank about how much she wants a boyfriend rather than pretending she's totally okay with the status quo (kpop fans can be creepily possessive, so it's difficult for idols to date, at least publically). She's even open with her insecurities, she talks about how much she hates how round her face is ALL THE TIME (to which I say: YOU'RE CRAZY SOOYOUNG, YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL.) She is fearless not just in her words, but in all aspects of her life. She doesn't seem to fear confrontation or letdowns or awkwardness or any amusement park ride or... anything. Fear is boring, she is Choi Sooyoung.
After being accepted into SM Entertainment, Sooyoung won some other audition for a Korea-Japan duo, and debuted in Japan under the name Route 0 when she was 12 (YES: AT THE AGE WHEN YOU AND I WERE TRYING TO PRETEND WE WERE ~TOO OLD~ FOR DOLLS AND HAVING AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR CRUSHES AT OUR LOCKERS, Sooyoung was already learning the ropes of international superstardom!). So even more than the other girls she has known, for most of her life, ~the pressures of fame~ and how to be independent. That experience also gave her fluency in Japanese, which has proved quite useful of late, given SNSD's debut in Japan in 2010. And even though the other girls have supposedly been studying Japanese since they've debuted in Japan, when they go on Japanese shows MOSTLY SOOYOUNG JUST IMPRESSES EVERYONE WITH HER FLUENCY, and then the other eight awkwardly recite Japanese introductions and then get interviewed in Korean. God knows why they don't just let Sooyoung do all the intervieweeing in Japan, it's not like she loves talking or anything...
Sooyoung is totally that girl who stuffs her face all the time and remains RIDICULOUSLY SKINNY. She is basically a tall stick. All of SNSD is super skinny, but I think a lot of the others consciously work to keep themselves at those weights (although apparently SNSD's food budget was significantly larger than Super Junior's, and Super Junior is made up of thirteen boys, so, I mean, that can't all be Sooyoung. ...I don't think). Noooooooot Sooyoung, she has a reputation to uphold. A reputation for eating. Although for some reason I think this plays into her getting coded as one of the less feminine ones, which is ridiculous, SHE IS SNSD'S RESIDENT FASHIONISTA.
I think of her mostly as brash and outspoken, but there is a softer side to her too. She, along with Tiffany, is one of SNSD's more devout Christians, and that has informed her life in many ways, I think. She cares a lot about justice, and doing good in her own small ways. She tries not to lie. Sometimes I think she is the most insecure member, which is funny because she acts like the most secure member, all confidence and gangsta attitude. I think she is sort of in search of a place to belong: with the members, with her college coursemates, with this theoretical boyfriend, anyone. She likes to feel needed, and in a lot of ways she has started to disappear among the nine over the years, which I think is hard for her. I live in constant hope that Japan will be the second coming of Sooyoung, to be honest I get cranky when other members get highlighted there.
ANYWAY SOOYOUNG IS TALL AND GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL AND KIND AND HYSTERICAL AND PERFECT, and if you don't love her you are just wrong.
YURI
Real Name: Kwon YuRi
Birthdate: December 5, 1989 (21)
Good at: Dancing
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 5 years and 11 months (so she would have been 11, I think she won a dance contest and that was what got her into SM)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Reading, Dance, Acting, Swimming, Sports
I don't really think of myself as having a favorite in SNSD, since they are all beautiful and perfect and darling and adorbs and hilarious, but I think that if you asked my friends who my favorite was, they would be like "DUH, YURI". This may or may not be because I casually refer to her as "my korean girlfriend"? All the time? When I made my post about how hot she is I made this joke (that I stole from a friend in the first place, natch) about how even in this band of super lovely girls, she is, like that bit in Love Actually, "the hot one". And she is. Everyone is beautiful or gorgeous or cute or whatever: Yuri is just hot. And not incidentally either: she knows exactly how to work the ~sexy~ image, how and when to move her body, the faces that go with it. She, like Seobb, is a big health food nut (she is also obsessed with skincare), so even though she ~gets it from her mama~ or whatever, it's not like she doesn't work to be that beautiful too. She's the second best dancer after Hyoyeon, but they're almost hard to compare: Hyoyeon has all this compressed power and natural ability, but there is something closed off about her dancing to me, it's like she dances for herself, that's why she's good. Yuri dances for the audience -- she thrives on passion and feeling and reaction and the moment, and that's why she's good. She's funny though, you wouldn't expect it of one of the best dancers but she is always one of the last the learn new choreography. And also the most likely to forget the lyrics, she is such a darling little space case.
I think most of SNSD was blindsided by how hard it was to be an idol and be in school at the same time, the kind of time commitment that took, Yuri included. But most of them were born in '89, and most of them got to graduate high school months after their debut, which must have been a relief. But the younger ones -- Sooyoung, Yoona, and Seohyun -- all had to keep on trucking with the school thing by necessity, and I guess they got used to it, because it can't be a coincidence that they are the ones that chose to enter university after they graduated. Most of the older ones haven't bothered, and god knows they have enough to do so who can really blame them. But in 2010 Yuri decided to start college. I-- don't know why I love that so much about her. I guess it just emphasizes how much she wants it, how much it was her decision, because do take college courses on top of her crazy idol schedule she has to want it. To start college two years after you would have, you have to think about it, you have to be sure.
To me it seems like more than any of the others, Yuri cares what people -- the public -- think of her. Which is one of the reasons people throw out when they say they dislike her, she ~tries too hard~ or ~cares too much about her image~ or whatever. I think it's fucking ridiculous that people expect all young women ever not to give a shit what people think about them -- especially in this case, when this girl has the eyes of an entire nation on her at all times. In a popularity sense, Yuri is smack-dab in the middle -- she's not at a level where the "big four" (Yoona, Taeyeon, Jessica, Tiffany) can really be called the big five, but you also can't call her underrated or underexposed like you can the bottomer four, she's not Yoona but she's gotten her due. All the same I think she envies the popularity of the others, especially Yoona, who she is really close to. She'd like that for herself, but she has no idea how to make it happen.
But maybe I just think that because Yuri is transparent, one of those people, who you can just sort of tell with. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She can't hide the pride she gets from being in SNSD or her desire to be loved because she's just not that person. She is the organizer: the one who makes lists of her complaints before confronting anyone, the one who would never have a messy purse, but she is also the pranker: the one who ties people's shoelaces together and makes weird dinosaur noises. And she is just weird, always building herself up by giving herself pep talks in the mirror. She... is a treasure, basically. I love her forever.
HYOYEON
Real Name: Kim HyoYeon
Birthdate: September 22, 1989 (21)
Good at: Dancing (she is the best of the dancing bunch)
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: 6 years and 1 month (so she started at 11)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Shopping, Dance, Chinese
Hyoyeon was the first member I learned to recognize, because I found out if you type "hyoyeon" into google "hyoyeon ugly" starts to pop up, and I was morally offended enough that I immediately began defensive stanning. WHAT UNIVERSE DO YOU ALL LIVE IN, SHE IS COMPLETELY GORGEOUS.
But I do think that the fact that she is the least traditionally beautiful is (sadly) a big part of why she is the underexposed and underrated. In almost every measure Hyoyeon is the least popular of the nine. Whether that is the fault of the company or the fans depends on who you ask, but she gets less screentime in music videos, less spots on variety television. If something gets cut, it's probably Hyoyeon. It's sad because I feel like her lack of popularity is such a part of her persona now that you can't really discuss Hyoyeon without discussing it. The first and last things you hear about Hyoyeon are always that she is underrated. "Hyoyeon is such a great dancer, she's so underrated!" "How come no one likes Hyoyeon, she's so funny!" "All I hear is how Hyoyeon is underrated, I think [member x] is actually the underrated one!"
Hyoyeon is a dancer. Technically, she's too good a dancer for SNSD, and she has said she thought about leaving, back in the "Kissing You" days: she wanted to dance, not spend her life and career waving around a lollipop. SNSD can't do hardcore choreography as a group because most of the singers just aren't capable, and that holds Hyoyeon back. But I don't think there's a better place for Hyoyeon anywhere in the idol world: there are other good dancers, in other groups; maybe it's better to be the best dancer, if perhaps also the least popular member of the most popular girl group than it is to battle it out for best dancer in a less popular, more dance-focused group. She is dynamite to watch, though, dance-wise: I love focusing on her during group performances and watching the way she hits the moves, especially compared to the way the non-dancers do (or don't).
Hyoyeon is my favorite to watch on variety shows, mostly because her schtick is defensiveness. Which doesn't sound funny at all, but omg it is. One of the other girls will tell a story about her cleaning the dorms while drunk, or her shopping addiction, or some other zany Hyoyeon habit and she will just sit there making this totally endearing :| face and then trying to interrupt them with "WHAT NO, YOU ARE EXAGGERATING". She's changed a lot, though, since debut-- she was one of the shier ones but she's gotten better and better at sticking her neck out, being chatty. Which is great because her chattiness is the most adorbs chattiness. She confessed to having a ~crush~ on another idol on a variety show in mid-2010 and gave a number of vague clues about his identity, and the public's interest in WHO HYOYEON LIKES simultaneously demonstrates her relevance and irrelevance. Because they did care, it was a big story, but in a lot of other circumstances a story like that would be perceived as a "threat". Yoona, for example, could never confess to liking anyone else in the industry, vaguely or specifically, because she would set off too many waves of jealousy. Hyoyeon is not famous for her looks, and she is therefore nonthreatening.
But also a total badass. Yuri and Seohyun were scared of her at one point, because she was the girl in their practice sessions who had like fourteen piercings and changed her haircolor weekly. And also because she could dance like this as a preteen. CHRIST, WHO IS THAT GOOD?! But contrastingly she is also the closest to a group mom as SNSD comes (there are plenty of group dads though, AND THEIR NAMES ALL START WITH T). She takes care of the younger members, and she's the best cook (although not the only good one, most of the SNSD members can cook well enough, except for Jessica, Tiffany, and Seobaby). Even though she is always the first to master new choreography, she is known for staying behind in practice to help Tiffany the other girls get the hang of it. I think what she wants most in life is family, and to be a mom, and she has said that she would give up stardom for love. (SHE'S JUST AN INDEPENDENT GIRL, looking for someone to depend on.)
Hyoyeon is quirky. She is the moodiest member, in a way that's hard to keep track of: she zips in and out of feelings in five minutes or less, in a mostly funny way. Everything about her is kind of funny like that, she's such a riot, she is constantly bursting with these completely random, blunt observations. Sometimes they are awkward, but mostly they are just funny. She is probably the quickest to make the other nine laugh. You can tell they treasure her, which I am so glad of because Hyoyeon is perfect and adorable everyone should treasure her.
But loving her is still hard because it is this CONSTANT CIRCLE OF DASHED HOPES. You hope that she will get her due facetime in a music video for once in her life, that they will put her in the front of the choreography since she is, you know, the best dancer, that she will be offered a regular variety spot, that she will get the love that she deserves in some way, somehow. She's the most likely to pop up as a "guest" on the radio with Taeyeon, or in We Got Married with Seohyun, which is great but also sad because you know it's just because she never has enough to do, in comparison. I think most SNSD fans, even if they are not Hyo-biased, treasure the moments when she gets picked as someone's ideal type or stands out the most in some show because it doesn't happen enough and it will probably never happen enough. But what can you do, life goes on.
TIFFANY
Real Name: Stephanie Hwang (her Korean name is Hwang MiYoung)
Birthdate: August 1, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Middler
Duration of Training: 2 years and 7 months (so was 15 when she MOVED TO KOREA WITHOUT HER FAMILY to start training)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, English, Flute, Singing
Tiffany sort of makes me cry.
See: once upon a time, she was a regular Korean-American girl, your average Californian valley girl stereotype. A cheerleader, a churchgoer. The baby of her family. I think that maybe if she hadn't lost her mom she might be just another american girl, enjoying her college years, about to graduate from one of the UCs, thinking about law school.
But she did lose her mom -- at age eleven, to cancer. And then she fell in love with BoA, ~*asian pop superstar*~. And when SM Entertainment, Boa's agency, held auditions in California, Tiffany went. And got in. And then, because she was the baby, because she hadn't known her mother nearly long enough, she somehow talked her Dad into letting her get on a plane and move to South Korea all by herself, to live in a dorm and train in dancing and singing so that she could be a korean popstar. She's hardly fearless in the brazen way Sunny and Sooyoung can be, but all the same I think that alone almost makes her the bravest one of them all.
There are two "Americans" in SNSD, Tiffany and Jessica, but they are not the same, on the scale of American-ness. Jessica spent her childhood years in the Bay Area, and went to the same American school in Seoul that Tiffany attended once she'd moved, but it's not the same. When Jessica and her sister Krystal were scouted by SM Entertainment, her parents moved back with them. Jessica is unquestionably fluent in English, but to her it seems more like a foreign tongue, like her second language that is slowly eroding with disuse. I think her family might've always spoken a lot of Korean at home, even when they were Americans. But Tiffany -- Tiffany's lived in South Korea for six years now, and she is, of course, intimately familiar with the culture and the language now. Some of that adjustment happened onscreen: in the early days of SNSD she makes frequent pronunciation errors, much to the amusement of the other eight girls, but she never really does anymore. She's a little quieter now than she was in the beginning, more aware of what kind of behavior is expected and desired from a korean celebrity. But I don't think she'll ever not think in English, or be more Korean than American. My favorite example of this is an interview from early 2010, when the girls were asked to pick a dude they'd like to bone (in uh, less vulgar terms) who was not from Korea. The other girls picked Justin Timberlake, Johnny Depp, Japanese drama actors. Tiffany picked Chace Crawford. LOL I DON'T KNOW, THAT IS SO WEIRDLY AMERICAN TO ME, not going for a superstar because she loves ~*that guy from Gossip Girl*~.
Tiffany's gotten a lot of grief for her American-ness, though, in a roundabout kind of way. She was sort of the rising star of SNSD in the beginning, the one that everyone noticed because of her cute eye-smile, the one that did the most variety programming. She made a couple of linguistic mistakes when talking about the super popular boybands in her company -- innocuous things that were misinterpreted because of her not-quite-complete grasp of the Korean language. (Don't want to waste wordcount on the ridiculous specifics, but if you are curious I can tell you.) ANYWAY SUDDENLY SHE WAS PUBLIC ENEMY #1 AMONG OVERINVESTED FANS OF SUPER JUNIOR AND DBSK, the "rude" one, the excuse to hate the entire group, which is so sad because she is the sweetest thing on the planet. Accounts of the girls filming commercials and meeting fans always single her out as the one who goes out of her way to be sweet to everyone. She is often described as the heart of the group, as Manager Hwang, because she cares so much about everyone, but especially the other eight and what they mean as a group. It is because of them that she is living her dream. And you could say that about any or all them, but it strikes me particularly with Tiffany, when I note things like the pride with with she explains, "oh actually, we're not editors, we're singers, we sing korean pop music" to an American (?) model when they visit New York on Factory Girl. The others chose kpop because that's what you do, when you are Korean and want to be famous. Tiffany chose it because she loved it.
Sometimes I think Tiffany loves singing the most out of all them. That seems unfair to say, in a way, because Taeyeon is the singer, and they all get a lot out of it, but Tiffany just loves to sing so much. She is one of the most ambitious, I think, she talks about wanting to act or sing solo in the US when SNSD eventually dissolves. Not that she would ever give up SNSD for that, she loves what she does now so much. She recently spent a month healing a knee injury in the dorms, and apparently groused about, hating not being with them. But she is still unquestionably one of the more ambitious ones, her career is definitely above love on the Tiffany Hwang list of priorities.
I think she has the personality of that annoying popular girl in school you can't hate because she is just so sweet all the time. She loves top 40 radio and the color pink (you can tell that she whines if there's a pink outfit and she doesn't get put in it for their live performance, there's no way she just coincidentally ends up in it all the time). She hates bugs. She's insanely, incredibly clumsy. She cheers you on with "GO ___, GO ___!", a bequest from her cheerleader days, I am sure. She works harder than anyone-- she'll never not be SNSD's worst dancer, but she spends more hours learning the steps than anyone all the same. The first introduction we get to Tiffany in "Girls Go To School", their first variety program, is Tiffany staying behind to call up "Daddy" and practice dancing while the other eight go off to shop and go out to eat. She is so hardworking, but more than that she is just... earnest and determined. Tiffany is so many things, but I think she is those two most of all.
SUNNY
Real Name: Lee SoonKyu
Birthdate: May 30, 1990 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: Officially "Unknown", which is code for she basically didn't train under SM but other some other company whose name I cannot recall.
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Sports, Music, Shopping
Sunny is ~*the cute one*~. She is known for her "aegyo", which is sort of the noun version of acting cute. With her the aegyo is shrill and constant. She is so adorable that it will make your blood boil. It is totally a game to her: she pitches her voice higher and higher until one of the other members snaps and hits her or throws something at her or kicks her or leaves, and then she is all giggles. (At this point she always becomes actually adorable, instead of fake adorable.)
Sunny is a chameleon, though. You would think that as the cute one, she would be one of the worst ones at doing the ~sexy~ thing: not so. She is second only to Yuri in that department. That is Sunny's gift: sure, she can sing, she can charm, but first and foremost she knows how to entertain, how to sell a performance. SNSD has done a wide range of concepts -- spies, military girls, cheerleaders, generic cuteness -- and Sunny has sold every single one of them with little visible effort. A choreographer once said of her, "Sunny... rather than say she dances well, she is good at expressing them. When it's her part, she is able to convey her image with conviction. It's possible because she possesses the talent to express herself." High praise, considering she is the second-worst dancer in the group. Sunny is hardly the most talented member -- she's a good singer, but her voice is often overlooked in favor of... well, all the other singers, actually -- and she is just... not a good dancer, but I think it is a credit to her abilities as a performer that no one ever really calls her dead weight in the group. Because everyone knows that's ridiculous: she adds so much.
Sunny is one of the less popular members, but it's funny how her level of popularity seems completely irrelevant to her in a way that it doesn't with a lot of the other members. She may not be the star, but she knows how to elbow her way into a niche. That was especially obvious with Invincible Youth, a show about idol girls learning the ropes of farming that she and Yuri (and a host of other girls from other girl groups) starred in: Sunny was a badass. We'd seen glimpses of that side of her before, for all her giggling and grinning and baby voicing she was always the one who's not afraid of the snakes and bugs and weird fish, but in IY she was a star, completely willing to do task asked of her, sacrificing her dignity constantly for our entertainment. Yuri, in comparison, was not nearly as adept at crafting a persona for herself, and as a result she got less and less screentime as the show went on, whereas Sunny seemed only to get more and more. She's got an instinct for what the audience wants in that way: she knows what to play up because it's funny, when to be herself and when to exaggerate. She is a master.
To me Sunny always sticks out in fanaccounts, for some reason. She always takes extra care in fansignings or something, goes out of her way to be nice to everyone so she ends up being the one you get stories about. My favorite it the story about how she tried to practice English on a girl with an American name, I guess I love it because her English is the most (adorably) accented, but it's sweet to me that she cares enough to want to try it out on the first hapless American fan she can find.
Her history is interesting to me because there are a lot of holes in it (from a public/fan perspective, obviously, I doubt she sits and home and thinks "MAN THERE ARE A LOT OF HOLES IN THE STORY OF MY LIFE"). She was born in Kuwait (actually possibly the US, I have heard that too, but regardless she lived in Kuwait as a very young child) near the time of the Gulf War, and those memories are the reason for her fear of fireworks. (This is probably Sunny's only fear, she certainly doesn't have a problem with weird animals or skydiving.) Her family was fairly opposed to her becoming a singer because many of them were in the industry already. Her uncle is the founder of SM Entertainment, and you can imagine there are some cries of nepotism, especially since she only trained a few short months under SM Ent. But she only switched over when the company she did her training at went under -- she says at her audition no one knew who she was. I don't know, those glimpses of how she grew up are so interesting to me, I want to know everythingggggggg.
JESSICA
Real Name: Jessica Jung (her Korean name is Jung SooYeon)
Birthdate: April 18, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Middler, laments the fact that she gets shunted off to the "short group" when she is BARELY shorter than Tiffany, okay, jesus.
Duration of Training: 7 years and 6 months (so she started at age 10)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Shopping, Music, Singing, English, Piano
Jessica Jung is sort of the jewel of the whole trainees training process, I think. She was scouted to audition -- well, really the story goes that her younger sister Krystal was scouted, but her parents thought Krystal was too young, so Jessica entered the company in her stead. (Krystal joined herself later on, and debuted in '09 as part of f(x).) And then she trained, in singing and dancing, for seven years. A lot of talent is innate, but talent can be trained with practice. I think Jessica is all, or mostly practice. Her voice is odd, maybe even shrill, but perfectly controlled. She doesn't draw your eyes when she dances, but she is precise about it in a way the other singers of the group (excepting Seohyun, obviously) usually are not (except when she's being lazy). A lot of the other girls love singing and/or dancing more than anything, and would have found a way to do that whether or not they had become members of SNSD and SM Entertainment, but I don't think that's true of Jessica. I think she has come to love what she does, but I don't think it was ever her one great passion in life.
Jessica is usually noted as SNSD's second best singer, although some people would argue that that is Tiffany. Jessica's voice is much more consistent and controlled that Tiffany's, but just the tone of Tiffany's voice is better? In my opinion? I think it makes their duets really interesting to listen to, though, because they are such opposites in terms of singing. And in many other ways, actually.
Where Tiffany is all warmth, Jessica's nickname of "ice princess" is well-earned. She just doesn't care, not about what anyone thinks of her, or if people are judging the way she acts. She is not going to pretend she's not bored or annoyed if she's bored or annoyed. She is a complete space case, and has a reputation for not paying attention during radio and television interviews, and reacting late. She has a habit of not participating in a conversation and then breaking in with the one awkward comment that completely destroys the humorous mood. She also likes sleeping, more than... basically anything. It's a running gag in a lot of Soshi-focused shows, catching her catnapping on the couch while the other girls run around, entertain the cameras. She can be hysterically violent and jokingly critical, and she easily has the best bitch face out of all of them. Which isn't to say she's not completely adorable or that she isn't a good, loving person: she just has a different way of expressing it. SHE HITS YOU OUT OF LOVE. No, but really, one of my favorite Jessica stories is one Krystal told, about how Krystal was spending all this time with Victoria (the eldest member of f(x)) and finally Jessica went "YAH! Is Victoria your sister or am I?" It's so simple but so Jessica to me, I don't even know.
I think the princess part of the ice princess title is fitting as well -- Jessica is frailer, more delicate than the other girls. Both her "Barbie Girl" solo for the SNSD concert tour and her jaunt as Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde musical were weirdly suited to her, she has the right air of girliness and exquisiteness for that kind of thing. (She is the most perfect blonde in all of kpop, I miss blonde Jessica EVERY DAY.) The fragility sort of goes in hand with the sleeping thing, she has a smaller energy bank than most people. Ugh, I hate to talk about weight but she is the only one I worry about in that department, she lost all her curves for awhile there, and her skinny skinniness doesn't seem as much part of her genes as Sooyoung's or Yoona's does. But maybe I am wrong, Krystal is teeny tiny too.
Jessica's fans seem more protective than the fans of the other girls to me. There is something so special about her, so different-- they all stand out in their ways, but to me she does most of all. There is something about her personality that is just... you either find it appealing or you do not, there aren't many inbetweens.
TAEYEON
Real Name: Kim TaeYeon
Birthdate: March 9th, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing (she is the best one)
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: 5 years and 3 months (so she started at 13)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, Singing
I have this morbid curiosity thing, and once upon a time I was watching a version of Into the New World that was fake-subtitled by ~anti-fans~. Most of it was predictable asinine insults, but Taeyeon's part was something like "HEY, I'm the only boy in SNSD, they call me Mr. Tae", and omg somewhere along the line that transformed my love for Taeyeon completely, I loved her for her dweebiness and her voice always but BEFORE I KNEW MR. TAE, IT WAS AN INCOMPLETE LOVE. I don't know what I did before I could make fun of her dudebro faces and make awkward jokes about her crying when her favorite sports team loses (those jokes are unfounded, for all I know she could not care less about sports). But seriously, if anyone claims that some other member is the biggest ~tomboy~, they are wrong. People forget about Taeyeon, because she doesn't look the part -- she is small and cute. But she is the one who spent her childhood playing with her brother's toys and roughhousing with him. The stylists can put her in skirts all they want, but they will never erase her dudebro nature.
The love for that might just be me and goldenmelisande, though, NOT REALLY SURE. Most other people seem perfectly capable of loving her for non-dudebro reasons. Like her dweebiness. Taeyeon is such a dork. When I was first getting into SNSD, trying to figure out how to tell the girls apart and who they were, what got me to notice/pay attention to Taeyeon was a video of her as a DJ, dancing along to a 4minute song like a big fat dweeb. There's not a good version of that up anymore, but I still think the best way to figure out her personality is through clips of her ChinChin radio show -- this or this or even this do a much better job of displaying her personality that I could hope do display in words. But of course I will try all the same: Taeyeon is super goofy. She is the giggliest creature, mostly because she cracks herself up. She could sit there and laugh at herself forever, endlessly entertained. That is the most obvious aspect of her, and I think it is what attracts so many people to her.
Ranking SNSD gets difficult, but the shadiness is in the middle ranks: much like Hyoyeon is completely accepted as the best dancer, Taeyeon is unquestionably SNSD's best singer. Articles and polls have called her the best singer in kpop period. And while it's hard to say if that's completely true, you only have to watch twenty seconds or so of this to know she's got it. It's funny because she doesn't even completely stand out when she's just singing, until she gets to a belting part, and then it's like holy shit. She's a tiny little powerhouse, and her adlibs make so many SNSD songs. There are other good singers, but they would be so much... less, as a group, without Taeyeon and her voice. She is the anchor in that way.
She's also the anchor in another way, though, in that she is the "leader". I think they mostly gave her that position because she was the oldest, that is usually, although not always, how these things work. I think because of that position she feels a lot of pressure to keep things together, to be in charge. And I think it was a weird place for her to be, at first, because she was not one of the "senior" trainees -- many of the girls had been together and training longer than her, and she just seems young. These days doesn't look like an 10-year-old the way she did at the time of their debut, but despite being the oldest member she still looks and acts like the youngest one of them a lot of the time. I think the leader thing adds another layer to an already conflicting personality -- for all she seems sweet and open and dorky and accessible, she is very private, one of the most closed off. The other girls are constantly berating her for not sharing her load with them, but she's one of those people who just can't. I think she separates herself from the group more than maybe any of the others, as much as she fits with them, she doesn't quite, because she's never ready to completely share herself with other people. And I think a lot of that has to do with her need to be perfect all the time, her need not to need people. Which comes in part from her and in part from being the leader.
Taeyeon is ambitious. Sometimes too ambitious: she bites off more than she can chew -- radio and MC positions, OST songs, the like. I worry about her perfect voice, she struggles with it more these days than she did in the beginning, to some degree all the exhaustion and work has taken it a beating. I wish she could take a month or two to rest and regenerate it, BUT LOL LIKE THA T WOULD EVER HAPPEN.
In the first episode of Girls Go To School, which was filmed as the girls were moving into a dorm together, really becoming a group for the first time, Taeyeon sets off by herself, goes to a bridge in the middle of the city at night, and yells out to the river: "I CAN DO THIS". And she can. That is Taeyeon. Her faith in her own ability is first. It informs every part of the person she is: exquisite, dweeby, strong, and complex.
Anyway yes! They are great! Although you are probably wondering what a person even does with all this information, and I... cannot tell you. I connect with SNSD by making up ridiculous space aus and waiting for Catherine to send me pictures she scopes out from tumblr. But you could watch things! I highly recommend Intimate Note, or maybe this (Taeyeon's episode is the best episode of the MTV specials, BUT IT'S NOT ON YOUTUBE, WHAT IS THIS!!! Most of the ones that aren't Taeyeon or Sooyoung are borderline boring, though). Soshified Forums are the hub of English fandom, although it gets... insipid over there. But they have the best subs, and it's worth signing up just for access to their streaming subbed videos: you can watch all their shows (Girls Go To School, Factory Girl, Horror Movie Factory, and Hello Baby), plus all their appearances on other shows. They are kind of endlessly entertaining. Or you could just youtube search "snsd funny" and see what clips pop up. Orrrrrrr you could go on a youtube binge, they have some excellent dance and song covers. There is fic, and you can scope out intoneworld or soshipops if that intrigues you, although a lot of it is bad and you might be safer in my delicious, or in the rec journal mankai. There's meta stuff there too, and snsd_ffa/snsd_metacrack can be good for that too, although sometimes they get a little too meta-y even for me. If you are a tumblr kind of person, goldenmelisande recommends these two tumblrs for general SNSD stuff, and a couple of member-specific ones for Tiffany, Taeyeon, Sooyoung, and Yuri. I am sure you can take it from there. You can get general kpop news from omonatheydidnt, although the comments are often terrible, and SNSD-specific news from snsdkorean. Which can also be terrible. KPOP FANDOM: kind of the worst. Ever. Enjoy that. M-maybe you should just stick with leaving me comments about how great they all are, instead of delving into it. (Or you could join ingenieus!)
(if you are like me and can usually immediately be like "I AM FOND OF THAT ONE!!" based on adorable facial expression alone, here are these photos membermapped so you can know which one you are fond of)
the basics
SNSD is a South Korean pop group made up of nine girls! They are kind of lame but mostly just super adorable. That is really all you need to know.
The name 소녀시대 (So Nyuh Shi Dae) comes from a Lee Seung Cheol song released in 1989 (...I think), which was later covered and released by the girls. For ~official purposes~ their english name is "Girls' Generation", but in English they mostly get called by the acronym SNSD, though, although at times you may see them called Soshi.
They debuted in August 2007, and their run of late 2007/early 2008 singles was met with pretty modest success, which was not entirely unexpected because historically in kpop, the boy bands were the cash cows. In 2008 they laid low for nine months and didn't release any new songs, possibly because that was the year a bunch of boy band fans decided they hated them forever, but also possibly just because they didn't feel like coming out with any new stuff. But at the beginning of 2009 they came out with the song "Gee", which was kind of a big deal. It is sort of the flagship song of the korean wave, an earworm of the highest order. It won all the awards, most of them many times over. And it catapulted SNSD from a random, almost-relevant girl group to #1. A lot of people called 2009 the year of Soshi, but with three korean hits and a ridiculously, implausibly successful Japanese debut, 2010 was just as much theirs. 2011 could easily be the same, there are rumors that they're going to hit Europe -- which is unprecedented in kpop -- and lately it seems like the company is putting out feelers in Los Angeles as well, they seem to be pushing the world domination angle.
Idoldom is messy though, and especially so for nine girls at the peak of their fame in a relatively conservative culture like South Korea's. They are simultaneously objectified and sexualized by one demographic and expected to be exemplars for another. A lot of their image is based on the idea of them as your perfect pliable imaginary girlfriend, and things like the music video for "Genie" (which comes off like a dating simulation) and the lyrics of "Oh!" (I LOVE YOU OPPA) emphasize this and KIND OF REALLY CREEP ME OUT, if I think too much about it. Even for their "fiercer" concepts they (or the company, really) are unwilling to sacrifice that image, in the story version of Run Devil Run, cheerleader!SNSD triumphs over sexy-scary-spacey!SNSD. And their "cute" concepts like Oh!/Gee have seen greater commercial success, so they are probably here to stay.
("The company", btw, is SM Entertainment, one of the "big three" entertainment companies in South Korea. They like making money and overworking their celebrities, just like every other entertainment company in South Korea.)
Anyway here is the thing: they are superstars, but they are also just girls (or women, really, now.) Intelligent girls who can be (and have been) critical of what they do even as they love it. Girls who love and support each other, but also love making fun of each other on television. Talented girls, no matter what anyone says. Who sing catchy-as-shit bubblegum pop music.
Anyway I love them all forever, and here is my TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY BIASED POST DEDICATED TO WHY.
the music (videos)
If you can't be bothered to slog through all of this, must-sees are marked with a *.
THE SINGLES
Mr. Taxi, a waste of 3 minutes of my life, tbh (December 2011)
The Boys (October 2011)
훗 (Hoot)* (October 2010)
Run Devil Run* (March 2010)
Oh! (January 2010)
소원을말해봐 (Genie) (June 2009)
Gee* (January 2009)
Baby Baby, although in some ways I feel like this belongs down with the misc music videos, it's a lot more in line with Way to Go/Snowy Wish than any of these up here. But Baby Baby was an officially promoted song and those two were not, SO! (March 2008)
Kissing You (January 2008)
소녀시대 (Girls' Generation) (November 2007)
다시 만난 세계 (Into the New World)* (August 2007)
JAPANESE SINGLES
Paparazzi* (June 2012)
Time Machine* (March 2012)
Bad Girl (August 2011), okay so not technically a single so much as a bonus album MV, just roll with it
Mr. Taxi* (April 2011)
Run Devil Run (April 2011)
Gee (September 2010)
Genie* (August 2010)
SUBGROUP RELEASES
Twinkle (April 2012)
오빠 나빠 (March 2008)
MISC MUSIC VIDEOS (MOSTLY COMMERCIALS)
Echo (July 2011)
Run Devil Run 3D Ver. ...lol (July 2011)
Visual Dreams, ughhhhhh WHY (January 2011)
첫눈에(Snowy Wish) (December 2010)
Genie 3D Ver., might be the greatest Genie MV if it were not full of disgustingly overzealous hair extensions (October 2010)
Cabi Song, MUTE IT AND PUT SOME OTHER SONG ON, I AM WARNING YOU NOW (May 2010)
Hey Cooky (April 2010)
Seoul*, aka the greatest music video (five members of) SNSD has/have ever participated in, possibly because it is the only one that has ever had a story (December 2009)
Chocolate Love* (October 2010)
HaHaHa (April 2009)
힘내! (Way To Go)* (January 2009)
Mabinogi (It's Fantastic) (December 2008)
the girls
SEOHYUN
Real Name: Seo JooHyun
Birthdate: June 28, 1991 (19)
Good at: Singing AND Dancing (IMAGINE THAT)
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 6 years and 6 months (so she started at age 10)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Music, Piano, Singing, Chinese
There are all these... things attached to being the youngest, or the "maknae" of a group, I don't know how to explain it, except to say that discussion of you is frequently tied to discussion of you as compared to what a "maknae" usually is or should be: cute, innocent, simultaneously everyone's bitch (although I think that's more with the dude groups) and everyone's baby. In a lot of ways Seohyun fits that better than a lot of maknaes do (but in other ways she doesn't). She was sixteen when the group debuted, but in their early shows she acts all of eleven, calling out for her mom when she gets scared at the amusement park, getting absurd amounts of joy out of her favorite cartoon Keroro (this is not Futurama, btw, it is actually a cartoon aimed at children, and yet here Seobb is in her late teens, holding her Keroro pillow and carrying her Keroro purse, dragging the older members with her to watch it get dubbed). She is so innocent that she projects it, it falls off her in waves. And it makes sense -- here is an only child, who displays all the behaviors of a girl who was coddled by both parents (I love Seohyun's mother by proxy, you hear her in so many of Seohyun's proclamations: "you can achieve anything you set your mind to" "don't get married until you're sure it won't tie you down" "the best gift I can give my parents is to be the best person I can be"; any woman who can raise her daughter to so earnestly believe all of those things is A HERO FOR OUR TIMES), who started training to be a celebrity at a very young age, and debuted at sixteen, and has since lived in a dorm with her eight inherited big sisters, who tease her but also dote on her. Relatedly until recently she had a reputation for hating boys. Possibly because she rarely interacted with them, possibly because she makes this face when they start taking off their shirts. (I say until recently because right now starring in a show called We Got Married, in which she pretends to be married to a member of a boy band. And she's nice to him. Usually.)
Seohyun is also a robot. If you train your eyes on her in almost any performance, you will usually notice she is just... HYSTERICALLY BLANK-FACED. She's a great singer and dancer, but in a sort of adorably emotionless way: and she is the worst of the nine at modeling/acting. EMOTIONS JUST AREN'T HER THING. She is also incredibly intelligent, and super dedicated to her schoolwork (she tears up at one point in Girls Go To School because people think entertainers are brainless!). She's currently in college despite her ridiculous schedule. I forget what she's studying, but she eventually wants to be a diplomat: the current UN Secretary General is her idol, which is so hysterically adorable, HOW MANY 19-YEAR-OLDS SAY THAT. Especially 19-year-old singers?! She seems to have a linguistic talent-- she is always noted as speaking Chinese in her ~offical profiles~ (although I think the only time she's done it on camera is while announcing SM global auditions so it's hard to comment on her communicative competence), her Japanese is decent (the girls say she and Sooyoung act as their Japanese teachers-- Sooyoung is definitely more fluent than Seobb, but Seobb's Japanese is pretty decently conversational, judging from her interactions with Ueno Juri on We Got Married, although I haven't yet seen her flex those linguistic muscles on an actual Japanese show), and -- this part is pure speculation -- I get the impression her English is the best of the non-Americans. Just from her pronunciation and a handful of sentences she's spoken at concerts. IDK I COULD BE WRONG THERE, but she is the best and the brightest, it's not that much of a stretch. She is the perfect daughter in a lot of ways: she does everything she's supposed to do (and more) when she's supposed to do it and then when she's done she tries to help everyone else achieve perfection. By squacking at them (BAD EATING ACCUMULATES AND EVENTUALLY YOU DIE). She is a stringently healthy eater to the degree that she is obsessed (!!!) with sweet potatoes (no, seriously) and says things like "that hamburger will kill you". She also goes to bed early (so she can regenerate skin cells properly, obviously) and wakes up early so she can read (mostly she likes self-help books! They make her a better person! In this way she is kind of a Hermione, whenever she has a problem she can't solve I think her first instinct is to FIND A BOOK ABOUT IT). She is also a great pianist -- an actually superb pianist. I feel like these ~profile~ things always stretch how good people are at things, in the sense that if you were writing one about, say, me, you would put piano down as a talent I have. And like, I could sit down and impress you with a couple of Beethoven and Tchiakovsky pieces but am I actually, genuinely good? Not really. Anyway Seobb is miles above me. MILES. Because she is perfect. And probably practices three hours every day. While she reads. And practices her Japanese. Always the good little robot.
A lot of people say that Seohyun is boring. I DON'T KNOW WHAT THOSE PEOPLE ARE SMOKING, she is the most unintentionally hysterical person in the world. Her earnestness! The seriousness with which she takes everything! Her whininess! Her bossiness! SHE BASICALLY THE GREATEST, the end.
YOONA
Real Name: Im YoonA
Birthdate: May 30, 1990 (20)
Good at: Dancing (she is also an actual actress with two dramas under her belt)
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 7 years and 2 months (so she was barely 10 when she became a trainee)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Acting, Dance
Yoona is the most popular member in a general sense (the fandom favors Taeyeon slightly, but the ~general public~ loves Yoona best) and the most overexposed in that her face is EVERYWHERE, and she is often the one who gets picked for commercial campaigns and dramas and the like (if there is only one picked). She's also the most requested for variety shows, shows up more frequently than the others as the ~girl~ in other people's music videos, gets put in the center of the choreography the most frequently, and is basically the face of the band. Kpop idols get asked about their "ideal type" a lot -- basically what celebrity do you want to bone -- and Yoona is so universally considered "perfect" that she is like, the boring answer to that question for dudes now. If you don't want to come up with someone specific, just say Yoona! And it is all because of her face. At 20, she has basically been declared the beauty standard for all of South Korea. Ugh that seems like an absurd amount of pressure to me, for someone so young.
I am sure, having read that, you know where this is going: she gets a lot of shit. A lot of it. Having a high profile leads to detractors, I suppose. Yoona is boring! Yoona is a bitch! Yoona is "fake"! Yoona cares too much about her image to be interesting! Yoona is nothing but a pretty face! Which is so sad to me, because if you pay any real attention to her -- ANY AT ALL -- she basically has the personality of an 8-year-old boy. Whatever "image" she displays to the public at large is created not by Yoona herself, but by SM Entertainment executives. Super Junior's Heechul said something about her that I just love: "The reason I’m close with Yoona: she’s definitely the prettiest girl in Korea. She’s even prettier without makeup. Although she’s pretty, she doesn’t pretend to be pretty. She’s always very bold, funny and destroys her own image. So I told her: you are pretty because you don’t pretend to be pretty."
The thing about Yoona is I don't think she wants the extra screentime. I don't think you can say that about most people in any kind of entertainment profession (and I personally don't think there's anything really wrong with wanting to be noticed or paid attention to). In the Gee days she was gone a lot, filming "Cinderella Man", and she has since talked about hating it -- hating that she was gone from the other members so much of the time, that she didn't even get to go to LA for the Hollywood Bowl with them. She also says things about wishing she could give up her face time for the less exposed members like Hyoyeon and Sooyoung. I don't know, I guess it's easier not to care about your popularity or exposure when you are the most popular one, but in a lot of ways Yoona seems genuinely uncomfortable with her notoriety. She's the quietest one of the nine in group interviews -- most of the attention she gets on variety shows happens because she is pulled out and called out and asked about. She keeps things to herself: we don't really know much about her family or where she came from -- whereas with a lot of the other members (Sooyoung especially, but also Yuri, Seohyun and kind of Tiffany) have had family members appear on television. Taeyeon's parents haven't appeared on TV (I don't think?) but their eyeglass shop is a shrine to her that fans stop by to drop gifts off to. A lot of the SNSD mothers seem like group mothers: they had one daughter, now they have eight more. I don't think Yoona's family is like that -- she likes to keep the spheres of her life separate in a way a lot of them don't. There are rumors about her mom having left her and her dad and her sister, and I'm sure that's part of why, but I also think to her keeping things separate is the best protection -- the best way to keep Im YoonA separate from YOONA. I think there's a lot of parts of her she keeps under wraps, and I do think she's learned, with time and practice, which part of her personality to show in many different situations. She's very aware of her image because she has to be, with that much attention trained on her -- and every so often she'll bring it up herself, make a joke about how she (or someone else) is ruining it. She's too important to really be able to forget that there are people watching. Which is a little bit sad, but then, once upon a time she was a ten-year-old who went to audition after audition after audition: and ten years later she's living that girl's dream.
Yoona is the name you'll see most often thrown around as "talentless", because she's not a good singer. She's really not, and she is the first to say that, the first to claim singing is her worst failing. But she's not an awful singer -- she sounds better than I would for sure -- it's just that her her voice is undeniably mediocre and she's mediocre at projecting it. She is, first and foremost, an actress -- which is kind of a funny thing to say, in a group that mostly requires singing and dancing. But her two dramas have played a huge part in her -- and therefore the group's -- popularity. She's also quite the dancer, and people forget that, mostly because she doesn't have the power or execution of Hyoyeon or the passion or energy of Yuri. IT'S HARD TO BE TIED FOR THIRD BEST. But she is good at it.
I always want to say Yoona has "more" close friendships within the group than other members do, but I don't think that's fair: they're all really close to each other and they all seem to have really close friendships among themselves. They build each other up, which I think is pretty remarkable in such a cutthroat industry. So I guess I will just say something about Yoona's friendships have always drawn my attention more than any of the others, which is funny because I think she flaunts it less, and is less prone to "fanservice" (exaggerating closeness because the fans like to ship you with your bandmembers, which is SUPER common among korean boybands and slightly less common with the girls, but def still there, especially with Soshi) than some of the others. To me Yoona seems to come in pairs, which is funny for a girl who is so often asked to stand on her own as the face of the group. But when they are all together she's always with Hyoyeon or Yuri or Seohyun or someone -- often off to the side, not in the center of the action. Sometimes she totally is in the action though, all goofy and mischevious. One of her trademarks is the fish face. She delights in annoying the other members of her band (especially Tiffany) and is constantly coming up with new ways to do it (and using the old standbys over and over again). (If that intrigues you and you ever have 30 minutes to spare, my main response to the SM town live backstage coverage was "I love Yoona so much, SHE'S SO IRRITATING". BABY SISTERS: SO GREAT. When they're not annoying you.)
SOOYOUNG
Real Name: Choi SooYoung
Birthdate: February 10, 1990 (20)
Good at: Dancing
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie (the tallest)
Duration of Training: 6 years and 3 months (so she started training at 11, although I don't totally understand because at age 12 she debuted in a jpop duo called Route0. And then I guess went back to Korea to finish her training, WHO EVEN KNOWS, I DON'T)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, Japanese, Dance, Acting
Sooyoung is hilarious. She is loud and outrageous and witty and endlessly entertaining. And more than that she is shameless: she is not afraid to be ridiculous, not afraid to go all out for that laugh, I don't think she's even afraid of the potential silence if that laughter doesn't come. BUT IT ALWAYS COMES. It's not really that she doesn't have a filter: she thinks about what she says, she just doesn't care enough to censor herself. She will tell stories about poop on television, but she will also talk point-blank about how much she wants a boyfriend rather than pretending she's totally okay with the status quo (kpop fans can be creepily possessive, so it's difficult for idols to date, at least publically). She's even open with her insecurities, she talks about how much she hates how round her face is ALL THE TIME (to which I say: YOU'RE CRAZY SOOYOUNG, YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL.) She is fearless not just in her words, but in all aspects of her life. She doesn't seem to fear confrontation or letdowns or awkwardness or any amusement park ride or... anything. Fear is boring, she is Choi Sooyoung.
After being accepted into SM Entertainment, Sooyoung won some other audition for a Korea-Japan duo, and debuted in Japan under the name Route 0 when she was 12 (YES: AT THE AGE WHEN YOU AND I WERE TRYING TO PRETEND WE WERE ~TOO OLD~ FOR DOLLS AND HAVING AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR CRUSHES AT OUR LOCKERS, Sooyoung was already learning the ropes of international superstardom!). So even more than the other girls she has known, for most of her life, ~the pressures of fame~ and how to be independent. That experience also gave her fluency in Japanese, which has proved quite useful of late, given SNSD's debut in Japan in 2010. And even though the other girls have supposedly been studying Japanese since they've debuted in Japan, when they go on Japanese shows MOSTLY SOOYOUNG JUST IMPRESSES EVERYONE WITH HER FLUENCY, and then the other eight awkwardly recite Japanese introductions and then get interviewed in Korean. God knows why they don't just let Sooyoung do all the intervieweeing in Japan, it's not like she loves talking or anything...
Sooyoung is totally that girl who stuffs her face all the time and remains RIDICULOUSLY SKINNY. She is basically a tall stick. All of SNSD is super skinny, but I think a lot of the others consciously work to keep themselves at those weights (although apparently SNSD's food budget was significantly larger than Super Junior's, and Super Junior is made up of thirteen boys, so, I mean, that can't all be Sooyoung. ...I don't think). Noooooooot Sooyoung, she has a reputation to uphold. A reputation for eating. Although for some reason I think this plays into her getting coded as one of the less feminine ones, which is ridiculous, SHE IS SNSD'S RESIDENT FASHIONISTA.
I think of her mostly as brash and outspoken, but there is a softer side to her too. She, along with Tiffany, is one of SNSD's more devout Christians, and that has informed her life in many ways, I think. She cares a lot about justice, and doing good in her own small ways. She tries not to lie. Sometimes I think she is the most insecure member, which is funny because she acts like the most secure member, all confidence and gangsta attitude. I think she is sort of in search of a place to belong: with the members, with her college coursemates, with this theoretical boyfriend, anyone. She likes to feel needed, and in a lot of ways she has started to disappear among the nine over the years, which I think is hard for her. I live in constant hope that Japan will be the second coming of Sooyoung, to be honest I get cranky when other members get highlighted there.
ANYWAY SOOYOUNG IS TALL AND GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL AND KIND AND HYSTERICAL AND PERFECT, and if you don't love her you are just wrong.
YURI
Real Name: Kwon YuRi
Birthdate: December 5, 1989 (21)
Good at: Dancing
Tallie or Shortie: Tallie
Duration of Training: 5 years and 11 months (so she would have been 11, I think she won a dance contest and that was what got her into SM)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Reading, Dance, Acting, Swimming, Sports
I don't really think of myself as having a favorite in SNSD, since they are all beautiful and perfect and darling and adorbs and hilarious, but I think that if you asked my friends who my favorite was, they would be like "DUH, YURI". This may or may not be because I casually refer to her as "my korean girlfriend"? All the time? When I made my post about how hot she is I made this joke (that I stole from a friend in the first place, natch) about how even in this band of super lovely girls, she is, like that bit in Love Actually, "the hot one". And she is. Everyone is beautiful or gorgeous or cute or whatever: Yuri is just hot. And not incidentally either: she knows exactly how to work the ~sexy~ image, how and when to move her body, the faces that go with it. She, like Seobb, is a big health food nut (she is also obsessed with skincare), so even though she ~gets it from her mama~ or whatever, it's not like she doesn't work to be that beautiful too. She's the second best dancer after Hyoyeon, but they're almost hard to compare: Hyoyeon has all this compressed power and natural ability, but there is something closed off about her dancing to me, it's like she dances for herself, that's why she's good. Yuri dances for the audience -- she thrives on passion and feeling and reaction and the moment, and that's why she's good. She's funny though, you wouldn't expect it of one of the best dancers but she is always one of the last the learn new choreography. And also the most likely to forget the lyrics, she is such a darling little space case.
I think most of SNSD was blindsided by how hard it was to be an idol and be in school at the same time, the kind of time commitment that took, Yuri included. But most of them were born in '89, and most of them got to graduate high school months after their debut, which must have been a relief. But the younger ones -- Sooyoung, Yoona, and Seohyun -- all had to keep on trucking with the school thing by necessity, and I guess they got used to it, because it can't be a coincidence that they are the ones that chose to enter university after they graduated. Most of the older ones haven't bothered, and god knows they have enough to do so who can really blame them. But in 2010 Yuri decided to start college. I-- don't know why I love that so much about her. I guess it just emphasizes how much she wants it, how much it was her decision, because do take college courses on top of her crazy idol schedule she has to want it. To start college two years after you would have, you have to think about it, you have to be sure.
To me it seems like more than any of the others, Yuri cares what people -- the public -- think of her. Which is one of the reasons people throw out when they say they dislike her, she ~tries too hard~ or ~cares too much about her image~ or whatever. I think it's fucking ridiculous that people expect all young women ever not to give a shit what people think about them -- especially in this case, when this girl has the eyes of an entire nation on her at all times. In a popularity sense, Yuri is smack-dab in the middle -- she's not at a level where the "big four" (Yoona, Taeyeon, Jessica, Tiffany) can really be called the big five, but you also can't call her underrated or underexposed like you can the bottomer four, she's not Yoona but she's gotten her due. All the same I think she envies the popularity of the others, especially Yoona, who she is really close to. She'd like that for herself, but she has no idea how to make it happen.
But maybe I just think that because Yuri is transparent, one of those people, who you can just sort of tell with. She wears her heart on her sleeve. She can't hide the pride she gets from being in SNSD or her desire to be loved because she's just not that person. She is the organizer: the one who makes lists of her complaints before confronting anyone, the one who would never have a messy purse, but she is also the pranker: the one who ties people's shoelaces together and makes weird dinosaur noises. And she is just weird, always building herself up by giving herself pep talks in the mirror. She... is a treasure, basically. I love her forever.
HYOYEON
Real Name: Kim HyoYeon
Birthdate: September 22, 1989 (21)
Good at: Dancing (she is the best of the dancing bunch)
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: 6 years and 1 month (so she started at 11)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Shopping, Dance, Chinese
Hyoyeon was the first member I learned to recognize, because I found out if you type "hyoyeon" into google "hyoyeon ugly" starts to pop up, and I was morally offended enough that I immediately began defensive stanning. WHAT UNIVERSE DO YOU ALL LIVE IN, SHE IS COMPLETELY GORGEOUS.
But I do think that the fact that she is the least traditionally beautiful is (sadly) a big part of why she is the underexposed and underrated. In almost every measure Hyoyeon is the least popular of the nine. Whether that is the fault of the company or the fans depends on who you ask, but she gets less screentime in music videos, less spots on variety television. If something gets cut, it's probably Hyoyeon. It's sad because I feel like her lack of popularity is such a part of her persona now that you can't really discuss Hyoyeon without discussing it. The first and last things you hear about Hyoyeon are always that she is underrated. "Hyoyeon is such a great dancer, she's so underrated!" "How come no one likes Hyoyeon, she's so funny!" "All I hear is how Hyoyeon is underrated, I think [member x] is actually the underrated one!"
Hyoyeon is a dancer. Technically, she's too good a dancer for SNSD, and she has said she thought about leaving, back in the "Kissing You" days: she wanted to dance, not spend her life and career waving around a lollipop. SNSD can't do hardcore choreography as a group because most of the singers just aren't capable, and that holds Hyoyeon back. But I don't think there's a better place for Hyoyeon anywhere in the idol world: there are other good dancers, in other groups; maybe it's better to be the best dancer, if perhaps also the least popular member of the most popular girl group than it is to battle it out for best dancer in a less popular, more dance-focused group. She is dynamite to watch, though, dance-wise: I love focusing on her during group performances and watching the way she hits the moves, especially compared to the way the non-dancers do (or don't).
Hyoyeon is my favorite to watch on variety shows, mostly because her schtick is defensiveness. Which doesn't sound funny at all, but omg it is. One of the other girls will tell a story about her cleaning the dorms while drunk, or her shopping addiction, or some other zany Hyoyeon habit and she will just sit there making this totally endearing :| face and then trying to interrupt them with "WHAT NO, YOU ARE EXAGGERATING". She's changed a lot, though, since debut-- she was one of the shier ones but she's gotten better and better at sticking her neck out, being chatty. Which is great because her chattiness is the most adorbs chattiness. She confessed to having a ~crush~ on another idol on a variety show in mid-2010 and gave a number of vague clues about his identity, and the public's interest in WHO HYOYEON LIKES simultaneously demonstrates her relevance and irrelevance. Because they did care, it was a big story, but in a lot of other circumstances a story like that would be perceived as a "threat". Yoona, for example, could never confess to liking anyone else in the industry, vaguely or specifically, because she would set off too many waves of jealousy. Hyoyeon is not famous for her looks, and she is therefore nonthreatening.
But also a total badass. Yuri and Seohyun were scared of her at one point, because she was the girl in their practice sessions who had like fourteen piercings and changed her haircolor weekly. And also because she could dance like this as a preteen. CHRIST, WHO IS THAT GOOD?! But contrastingly she is also the closest to a group mom as SNSD comes (there are plenty of group dads though, AND THEIR NAMES ALL START WITH T). She takes care of the younger members, and she's the best cook (although not the only good one, most of the SNSD members can cook well enough, except for Jessica, Tiffany, and Seobaby). Even though she is always the first to master new choreography, she is known for staying behind in practice to help Tiffany the other girls get the hang of it. I think what she wants most in life is family, and to be a mom, and she has said that she would give up stardom for love. (SHE'S JUST AN INDEPENDENT GIRL, looking for someone to depend on.)
Hyoyeon is quirky. She is the moodiest member, in a way that's hard to keep track of: she zips in and out of feelings in five minutes or less, in a mostly funny way. Everything about her is kind of funny like that, she's such a riot, she is constantly bursting with these completely random, blunt observations. Sometimes they are awkward, but mostly they are just funny. She is probably the quickest to make the other nine laugh. You can tell they treasure her, which I am so glad of because Hyoyeon is perfect and adorable everyone should treasure her.
But loving her is still hard because it is this CONSTANT CIRCLE OF DASHED HOPES. You hope that she will get her due facetime in a music video for once in her life, that they will put her in the front of the choreography since she is, you know, the best dancer, that she will be offered a regular variety spot, that she will get the love that she deserves in some way, somehow. She's the most likely to pop up as a "guest" on the radio with Taeyeon, or in We Got Married with Seohyun, which is great but also sad because you know it's just because she never has enough to do, in comparison. I think most SNSD fans, even if they are not Hyo-biased, treasure the moments when she gets picked as someone's ideal type or stands out the most in some show because it doesn't happen enough and it will probably never happen enough. But what can you do, life goes on.
TIFFANY
Real Name: Stephanie Hwang (her Korean name is Hwang MiYoung)
Birthdate: August 1, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Middler
Duration of Training: 2 years and 7 months (so was 15 when she MOVED TO KOREA WITHOUT HER FAMILY to start training)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, English, Flute, Singing
Tiffany sort of makes me cry.
See: once upon a time, she was a regular Korean-American girl, your average Californian valley girl stereotype. A cheerleader, a churchgoer. The baby of her family. I think that maybe if she hadn't lost her mom she might be just another american girl, enjoying her college years, about to graduate from one of the UCs, thinking about law school.
But she did lose her mom -- at age eleven, to cancer. And then she fell in love with BoA, ~*asian pop superstar*~. And when SM Entertainment, Boa's agency, held auditions in California, Tiffany went. And got in. And then, because she was the baby, because she hadn't known her mother nearly long enough, she somehow talked her Dad into letting her get on a plane and move to South Korea all by herself, to live in a dorm and train in dancing and singing so that she could be a korean popstar. She's hardly fearless in the brazen way Sunny and Sooyoung can be, but all the same I think that alone almost makes her the bravest one of them all.
There are two "Americans" in SNSD, Tiffany and Jessica, but they are not the same, on the scale of American-ness. Jessica spent her childhood years in the Bay Area, and went to the same American school in Seoul that Tiffany attended once she'd moved, but it's not the same. When Jessica and her sister Krystal were scouted by SM Entertainment, her parents moved back with them. Jessica is unquestionably fluent in English, but to her it seems more like a foreign tongue, like her second language that is slowly eroding with disuse. I think her family might've always spoken a lot of Korean at home, even when they were Americans. But Tiffany -- Tiffany's lived in South Korea for six years now, and she is, of course, intimately familiar with the culture and the language now. Some of that adjustment happened onscreen: in the early days of SNSD she makes frequent pronunciation errors, much to the amusement of the other eight girls, but she never really does anymore. She's a little quieter now than she was in the beginning, more aware of what kind of behavior is expected and desired from a korean celebrity. But I don't think she'll ever not think in English, or be more Korean than American. My favorite example of this is an interview from early 2010, when the girls were asked to pick a dude they'd like to bone (in uh, less vulgar terms) who was not from Korea. The other girls picked Justin Timberlake, Johnny Depp, Japanese drama actors. Tiffany picked Chace Crawford. LOL I DON'T KNOW, THAT IS SO WEIRDLY AMERICAN TO ME, not going for a superstar because she loves ~*that guy from Gossip Girl*~.
Tiffany's gotten a lot of grief for her American-ness, though, in a roundabout kind of way. She was sort of the rising star of SNSD in the beginning, the one that everyone noticed because of her cute eye-smile, the one that did the most variety programming. She made a couple of linguistic mistakes when talking about the super popular boybands in her company -- innocuous things that were misinterpreted because of her not-quite-complete grasp of the Korean language. (Don't want to waste wordcount on the ridiculous specifics, but if you are curious I can tell you.) ANYWAY SUDDENLY SHE WAS PUBLIC ENEMY #1 AMONG OVERINVESTED FANS OF SUPER JUNIOR AND DBSK, the "rude" one, the excuse to hate the entire group, which is so sad because she is the sweetest thing on the planet. Accounts of the girls filming commercials and meeting fans always single her out as the one who goes out of her way to be sweet to everyone. She is often described as the heart of the group, as Manager Hwang, because she cares so much about everyone, but especially the other eight and what they mean as a group. It is because of them that she is living her dream. And you could say that about any or all them, but it strikes me particularly with Tiffany, when I note things like the pride with with she explains, "oh actually, we're not editors, we're singers, we sing korean pop music" to an American (?) model when they visit New York on Factory Girl. The others chose kpop because that's what you do, when you are Korean and want to be famous. Tiffany chose it because she loved it.
Sometimes I think Tiffany loves singing the most out of all them. That seems unfair to say, in a way, because Taeyeon is the singer, and they all get a lot out of it, but Tiffany just loves to sing so much. She is one of the most ambitious, I think, she talks about wanting to act or sing solo in the US when SNSD eventually dissolves. Not that she would ever give up SNSD for that, she loves what she does now so much. She recently spent a month healing a knee injury in the dorms, and apparently groused about, hating not being with them. But she is still unquestionably one of the more ambitious ones, her career is definitely above love on the Tiffany Hwang list of priorities.
I think she has the personality of that annoying popular girl in school you can't hate because she is just so sweet all the time. She loves top 40 radio and the color pink (you can tell that she whines if there's a pink outfit and she doesn't get put in it for their live performance, there's no way she just coincidentally ends up in it all the time). She hates bugs. She's insanely, incredibly clumsy. She cheers you on with "GO ___, GO ___!", a bequest from her cheerleader days, I am sure. She works harder than anyone-- she'll never not be SNSD's worst dancer, but she spends more hours learning the steps than anyone all the same. The first introduction we get to Tiffany in "Girls Go To School", their first variety program, is Tiffany staying behind to call up "Daddy" and practice dancing while the other eight go off to shop and go out to eat. She is so hardworking, but more than that she is just... earnest and determined. Tiffany is so many things, but I think she is those two most of all.
SUNNY
Real Name: Lee SoonKyu
Birthdate: May 30, 1990 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: Officially "Unknown", which is code for she basically didn't train under SM but other some other company whose name I cannot recall.
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Sports, Music, Shopping
Sunny is ~*the cute one*~. She is known for her "aegyo", which is sort of the noun version of acting cute. With her the aegyo is shrill and constant. She is so adorable that it will make your blood boil. It is totally a game to her: she pitches her voice higher and higher until one of the other members snaps and hits her or throws something at her or kicks her or leaves, and then she is all giggles. (At this point she always becomes actually adorable, instead of fake adorable.)
Sunny is a chameleon, though. You would think that as the cute one, she would be one of the worst ones at doing the ~sexy~ thing: not so. She is second only to Yuri in that department. That is Sunny's gift: sure, she can sing, she can charm, but first and foremost she knows how to entertain, how to sell a performance. SNSD has done a wide range of concepts -- spies, military girls, cheerleaders, generic cuteness -- and Sunny has sold every single one of them with little visible effort. A choreographer once said of her, "Sunny... rather than say she dances well, she is good at expressing them. When it's her part, she is able to convey her image with conviction. It's possible because she possesses the talent to express herself." High praise, considering she is the second-worst dancer in the group. Sunny is hardly the most talented member -- she's a good singer, but her voice is often overlooked in favor of... well, all the other singers, actually -- and she is just... not a good dancer, but I think it is a credit to her abilities as a performer that no one ever really calls her dead weight in the group. Because everyone knows that's ridiculous: she adds so much.
Sunny is one of the less popular members, but it's funny how her level of popularity seems completely irrelevant to her in a way that it doesn't with a lot of the other members. She may not be the star, but she knows how to elbow her way into a niche. That was especially obvious with Invincible Youth, a show about idol girls learning the ropes of farming that she and Yuri (and a host of other girls from other girl groups) starred in: Sunny was a badass. We'd seen glimpses of that side of her before, for all her giggling and grinning and baby voicing she was always the one who's not afraid of the snakes and bugs and weird fish, but in IY she was a star, completely willing to do task asked of her, sacrificing her dignity constantly for our entertainment. Yuri, in comparison, was not nearly as adept at crafting a persona for herself, and as a result she got less and less screentime as the show went on, whereas Sunny seemed only to get more and more. She's got an instinct for what the audience wants in that way: she knows what to play up because it's funny, when to be herself and when to exaggerate. She is a master.
To me Sunny always sticks out in fanaccounts, for some reason. She always takes extra care in fansignings or something, goes out of her way to be nice to everyone so she ends up being the one you get stories about. My favorite it the story about how she tried to practice English on a girl with an American name, I guess I love it because her English is the most (adorably) accented, but it's sweet to me that she cares enough to want to try it out on the first hapless American fan she can find.
Her history is interesting to me because there are a lot of holes in it (from a public/fan perspective, obviously, I doubt she sits and home and thinks "MAN THERE ARE A LOT OF HOLES IN THE STORY OF MY LIFE"). She was born in Kuwait (actually possibly the US, I have heard that too, but regardless she lived in Kuwait as a very young child) near the time of the Gulf War, and those memories are the reason for her fear of fireworks. (This is probably Sunny's only fear, she certainly doesn't have a problem with weird animals or skydiving.) Her family was fairly opposed to her becoming a singer because many of them were in the industry already. Her uncle is the founder of SM Entertainment, and you can imagine there are some cries of nepotism, especially since she only trained a few short months under SM Ent. But she only switched over when the company she did her training at went under -- she says at her audition no one knew who she was. I don't know, those glimpses of how she grew up are so interesting to me, I want to know everythingggggggg.
JESSICA
Real Name: Jessica Jung (her Korean name is Jung SooYeon)
Birthdate: April 18, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing
Tallie or Shortie: Middler, laments the fact that she gets shunted off to the "short group" when she is BARELY shorter than Tiffany, okay, jesus.
Duration of Training: 7 years and 6 months (so she started at age 10)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Shopping, Music, Singing, English, Piano
Jessica Jung is sort of the jewel of the whole trainees training process, I think. She was scouted to audition -- well, really the story goes that her younger sister Krystal was scouted, but her parents thought Krystal was too young, so Jessica entered the company in her stead. (Krystal joined herself later on, and debuted in '09 as part of f(x).) And then she trained, in singing and dancing, for seven years. A lot of talent is innate, but talent can be trained with practice. I think Jessica is all, or mostly practice. Her voice is odd, maybe even shrill, but perfectly controlled. She doesn't draw your eyes when she dances, but she is precise about it in a way the other singers of the group (excepting Seohyun, obviously) usually are not (except when she's being lazy). A lot of the other girls love singing and/or dancing more than anything, and would have found a way to do that whether or not they had become members of SNSD and SM Entertainment, but I don't think that's true of Jessica. I think she has come to love what she does, but I don't think it was ever her one great passion in life.
Jessica is usually noted as SNSD's second best singer, although some people would argue that that is Tiffany. Jessica's voice is much more consistent and controlled that Tiffany's, but just the tone of Tiffany's voice is better? In my opinion? I think it makes their duets really interesting to listen to, though, because they are such opposites in terms of singing. And in many other ways, actually.
Where Tiffany is all warmth, Jessica's nickname of "ice princess" is well-earned. She just doesn't care, not about what anyone thinks of her, or if people are judging the way she acts. She is not going to pretend she's not bored or annoyed if she's bored or annoyed. She is a complete space case, and has a reputation for not paying attention during radio and television interviews, and reacting late. She has a habit of not participating in a conversation and then breaking in with the one awkward comment that completely destroys the humorous mood. She also likes sleeping, more than... basically anything. It's a running gag in a lot of Soshi-focused shows, catching her catnapping on the couch while the other girls run around, entertain the cameras. She can be hysterically violent and jokingly critical, and she easily has the best bitch face out of all of them. Which isn't to say she's not completely adorable or that she isn't a good, loving person: she just has a different way of expressing it. SHE HITS YOU OUT OF LOVE. No, but really, one of my favorite Jessica stories is one Krystal told, about how Krystal was spending all this time with Victoria (the eldest member of f(x)) and finally Jessica went "YAH! Is Victoria your sister or am I?" It's so simple but so Jessica to me, I don't even know.
I think the princess part of the ice princess title is fitting as well -- Jessica is frailer, more delicate than the other girls. Both her "Barbie Girl" solo for the SNSD concert tour and her jaunt as Elle Woods in the Legally Blonde musical were weirdly suited to her, she has the right air of girliness and exquisiteness for that kind of thing. (She is the most perfect blonde in all of kpop, I miss blonde Jessica EVERY DAY.) The fragility sort of goes in hand with the sleeping thing, she has a smaller energy bank than most people. Ugh, I hate to talk about weight but she is the only one I worry about in that department, she lost all her curves for awhile there, and her skinny skinniness doesn't seem as much part of her genes as Sooyoung's or Yoona's does. But maybe I am wrong, Krystal is teeny tiny too.
Jessica's fans seem more protective than the fans of the other girls to me. There is something so special about her, so different-- they all stand out in their ways, but to me she does most of all. There is something about her personality that is just... you either find it appealing or you do not, there aren't many inbetweens.
TAEYEON
Real Name: Kim TaeYeon
Birthdate: March 9th, 1989 (21)
Good at: Singing (she is the best one)
Tallie or Shortie: Shortie
Duration of Training: 5 years and 3 months (so she started at 13)
Interests (According to Japanese Profile Circa 2010): Movies, Music, Singing
I have this morbid curiosity thing, and once upon a time I was watching a version of Into the New World that was fake-subtitled by ~anti-fans~. Most of it was predictable asinine insults, but Taeyeon's part was something like "HEY, I'm the only boy in SNSD, they call me Mr. Tae", and omg somewhere along the line that transformed my love for Taeyeon completely, I loved her for her dweebiness and her voice always but BEFORE I KNEW MR. TAE, IT WAS AN INCOMPLETE LOVE. I don't know what I did before I could make fun of her dudebro faces and make awkward jokes about her crying when her favorite sports team loses (those jokes are unfounded, for all I know she could not care less about sports). But seriously, if anyone claims that some other member is the biggest ~tomboy~, they are wrong. People forget about Taeyeon, because she doesn't look the part -- she is small and cute. But she is the one who spent her childhood playing with her brother's toys and roughhousing with him. The stylists can put her in skirts all they want, but they will never erase her dudebro nature.
The love for that might just be me and goldenmelisande, though, NOT REALLY SURE. Most other people seem perfectly capable of loving her for non-dudebro reasons. Like her dweebiness. Taeyeon is such a dork. When I was first getting into SNSD, trying to figure out how to tell the girls apart and who they were, what got me to notice/pay attention to Taeyeon was a video of her as a DJ, dancing along to a 4minute song like a big fat dweeb. There's not a good version of that up anymore, but I still think the best way to figure out her personality is through clips of her ChinChin radio show -- this or this or even this do a much better job of displaying her personality that I could hope do display in words. But of course I will try all the same: Taeyeon is super goofy. She is the giggliest creature, mostly because she cracks herself up. She could sit there and laugh at herself forever, endlessly entertained. That is the most obvious aspect of her, and I think it is what attracts so many people to her.
Ranking SNSD gets difficult, but the shadiness is in the middle ranks: much like Hyoyeon is completely accepted as the best dancer, Taeyeon is unquestionably SNSD's best singer. Articles and polls have called her the best singer in kpop period. And while it's hard to say if that's completely true, you only have to watch twenty seconds or so of this to know she's got it. It's funny because she doesn't even completely stand out when she's just singing, until she gets to a belting part, and then it's like holy shit. She's a tiny little powerhouse, and her adlibs make so many SNSD songs. There are other good singers, but they would be so much... less, as a group, without Taeyeon and her voice. She is the anchor in that way.
She's also the anchor in another way, though, in that she is the "leader". I think they mostly gave her that position because she was the oldest, that is usually, although not always, how these things work. I think because of that position she feels a lot of pressure to keep things together, to be in charge. And I think it was a weird place for her to be, at first, because she was not one of the "senior" trainees -- many of the girls had been together and training longer than her, and she just seems young. These days doesn't look like an 10-year-old the way she did at the time of their debut, but despite being the oldest member she still looks and acts like the youngest one of them a lot of the time. I think the leader thing adds another layer to an already conflicting personality -- for all she seems sweet and open and dorky and accessible, she is very private, one of the most closed off. The other girls are constantly berating her for not sharing her load with them, but she's one of those people who just can't. I think she separates herself from the group more than maybe any of the others, as much as she fits with them, she doesn't quite, because she's never ready to completely share herself with other people. And I think a lot of that has to do with her need to be perfect all the time, her need not to need people. Which comes in part from her and in part from being the leader.
Taeyeon is ambitious. Sometimes too ambitious: she bites off more than she can chew -- radio and MC positions, OST songs, the like. I worry about her perfect voice, she struggles with it more these days than she did in the beginning, to some degree all the exhaustion and work has taken it a beating. I wish she could take a month or two to rest and regenerate it, BUT LOL LIKE THA T WOULD EVER HAPPEN.
In the first episode of Girls Go To School, which was filmed as the girls were moving into a dorm together, really becoming a group for the first time, Taeyeon sets off by herself, goes to a bridge in the middle of the city at night, and yells out to the river: "I CAN DO THIS". And she can. That is Taeyeon. Her faith in her own ability is first. It informs every part of the person she is: exquisite, dweeby, strong, and complex.
Anyway yes! They are great! Although you are probably wondering what a person even does with all this information, and I... cannot tell you. I connect with SNSD by making up ridiculous space aus and waiting for Catherine to send me pictures she scopes out from tumblr. But you could watch things! I highly recommend Intimate Note, or maybe this (Taeyeon's episode is the best episode of the MTV specials, BUT IT'S NOT ON YOUTUBE, WHAT IS THIS!!! Most of the ones that aren't Taeyeon or Sooyoung are borderline boring, though). Soshified Forums are the hub of English fandom, although it gets... insipid over there. But they have the best subs, and it's worth signing up just for access to their streaming subbed videos: you can watch all their shows (Girls Go To School, Factory Girl, Horror Movie Factory, and Hello Baby), plus all their appearances on other shows. They are kind of endlessly entertaining. Or you could just youtube search "snsd funny" and see what clips pop up. Orrrrrrr you could go on a youtube binge, they have some excellent dance and song covers. There is fic, and you can scope out intoneworld or soshipops if that intrigues you, although a lot of it is bad and you might be safer in my delicious, or in the rec journal mankai. There's meta stuff there too, and snsd_ffa/snsd_metacrack can be good for that too, although sometimes they get a little too meta-y even for me. If you are a tumblr kind of person, goldenmelisande recommends these two tumblrs for general SNSD stuff, and a couple of member-specific ones for Tiffany, Taeyeon, Sooyoung, and Yuri. I am sure you can take it from there. You can get general kpop news from omonatheydidnt, although the comments are often terrible, and SNSD-specific news from snsdkorean. Which can also be terrible. KPOP FANDOM: kind of the worst. Ever. Enjoy that. M-maybe you should just stick with leaving me comments about how great they all are, instead of delving into it. (Or you could join ingenieus!)