PhilPaine.com

For quite some time, Cool and Wax dom­i­nated Kore­an pop music. Wax is the stage name for a tal­ented female vocal­ist with a very expres­sive, and some­times beau­ti­ful voice. Her arrange­ments range from cheesy syn­the­sizer pop to fair­ly raunchy rhythm and blues. In some cas­es, gen­res are bizarrely mixed, such as when a cho­rus of grunt­ing male met­al voic­es inex­plic­a­bly fill in the spaces between vers­es of a Brit­ney Spears-ish love song. This may all sound pret­ty trashy to a North Amer­i­can lis­tener, but there’s no law against musi­cal syn­chretism, and in any case, East Asian pop plays by its own rules. I’m told that a lot of her suc­cess comes from the per­spi­cac­ity of her song­writ­ers, Choi Joon Young and Kim Gee Hoonong. It can’t all be in the lyrics: Wax’s pop­u­lar­ity extends far beyond the K‑pop scene, to the much broad­er East Asian pop scene cov­er­ing Chi­na, HK, Tai­wan, Viet­nam, Sin­ga­pore and Japan. My expo­sure is through the dou­ble com­pi­la­tion album Best Day & Best Night and the third album from 2002, Wax 3.