The world of Chinese style creates a prosperous era for girl groups

The performance rules of the fifth public performance are the same as the previous ones.

There are now 52 people left in the program team.

The fifty-two students are still distributed in six classes, including 9 people in Class A, 9 people in Class B, 9 people in Class C, 9 people in Class D, 10 people in Class E, and 6 people in Class F.

The fifth public stage will eliminate one person each from Class B to Class E and three people from Class F, which means a total of seven people will be eliminated, and the remaining 3 people will enter the final six public stages.

At first, Xia Haoyang and other instructors were worried about the attitudes of the students, and worried that some of them would not work hard on stage because they had no pressure and fighting spirit, which would lower the performance effect. Unexpectedly, the performances of each class remained at a high level throughout the night, and no one was obviously in poor condition.

Ultimately, the students are too young and lack social experience. After receiving a stern warning from the music company representative, their attitude towards daily training has improved a lot.

Moreover, ten minutes on stage requires ten years of hard work off stage.

The students have all received years of training and learning, and they have a desire and expectation for competition and the stage that is difficult for ordinary people to understand. Maybe they are careless and just get by during training, but once they return to the stage, their full concentration and seriousness seem to be innate, and they will never deliberately slack off.

The first performer from Class A was Kim Sejeong, who won the MVP award in the previous episode. She sang a solo song "rain" specially composed for her by Xia Haoyang.

During the third public stage show, Xia Haoyang wrote a song "To. X" for Jin Na, who won the MVP, which was a satire on scumbag men. It won the love of almost all the students, and every student was secretly practicing this song in private.

"To. X" is the solo work of the former Girls' Generation lead singer Kim Taeyeon, so in this issue Xia Haoyang once again brought out a classic work of Taeyeon.

"Rain" is a soulful, medium-tempo jazz song with a unique melody and harmony that impresses. The touching lyrics compare the memories of a broken-up lover to "rain," describing the story of reminiscing about the beautiful love in the past.

This atmospheric and emotionally charged piece begins with a gentle piano prelude, complemented by electronic sound effects and a progressive string arrangement, creating a damp and lonely atmosphere on a rainy day. The melodic lines of the chorus are melodious and layered, and combined with the ethereal harmony design, it creates an immersive feeling like a "monologue in the rain."

The rhythm of the whole song is slow, with rain sound samples and metronome-like electronic drum beats. It not only retains the rhythm of pop music, but also strengthens the narrative of the song, as if the image of raindrops knocking on the heart runs through the whole song.

The reason why Xia Haoyang gave this song to Kim Sejeong to sing is that Sejeong's own cold voice is highly consistent with the melancholy tone of the song. Kim Sejeong has excellent singing ability and rich stage experience. She can switch between breathy voice and head voice freely, especially in the chorus transition part, which shows her precise control of details.

The difficulty of this song lies in the emotional progression from the verse to the bridge. Her handling of strength and weakness is delicate and dramatic. For example, in the sentence "I still stand here, letting the rain soak through", the repressed emotions need to be pushed to the climax through gradually increasing pronunciation. As one of the two ace lead singers of this program group, Kim Sejeong handled it with ease.

Perfect live performance!

Whether it was the mentors, the audience in the auditorium, or the other students who were watching attentively backstage, they all stood up and applauded to show their love for Kim Sejeong's singing.

Jin Shizheng is one of the contestants who has been selected by the program team and has the highest support rate among the audience. She is definitely the trainee who will make her debut in the end. Therefore, Xia Haoyang expressed his recognition and love for her without any taboos:

"Sejeong is worthy of being the strongest "emotional lead singer" of the program team. "Rain" is a work that deeply integrates technical singing and poetic expression. To perfectly express this song requires extremely superb emotional expression ability, and Sejeong showed her hard power as a top vocalist on the stage, and also highlighted her sensitivity to emotional narrative. When this episode is broadcast on TV, I will definitely watch it, because I think for the audience, this is an "auditory rainfall" worth savoring over and over again, and each listen may trigger different emotional ripples."

Xia Haoyang pretended to be so moved that the singer on the stage almost cried, but in fact, when the fifth public performance was broadcast on TV, Xia Haoyang had long forgotten about it. Why did he keep thinking about it? This is pure bullshit, but that's another story.

The atmosphere on the scene immediately rose to another level after his comments. Perhaps the other students took their singing and dancing seriously, which was also related to Xia Haoyang's praise for Kim Sejeong who appeared first.

Next was the song "Pretty Savage" sung by nine members of Class A.

Blackpink's "Pretty Savage" is a signature track from their first full-length album "THE ALBUM". With its aggressive musical style and distinctive feminist declaration, it demonstrates a new height of "Girl Crush" aesthetics in the global context of K-pop.

This song is based on the dark Trap rhythm, with sharp synthesizer sounds (such as electronic sounds similar to metal scraping) and the roar of the bass, creating a cold texture like "Mechanical Warrior". The repeated "Pretty Savage" in the chorus is processed by Auto-Tune, turning the human voice into a weaponized sonic impact, strengthening the theme of "sweetness and violence coexisting".

This song breaks the traditional K-pop structure, weakening the transition logic of verse-pre-chorus-chorus, and instead uses a large number of stacked rap sections (especially Jennie and Lisa's rapid consecutive readings), and only inserts Rosé and Jisoo's melodic singing in the bridge part, forming a subversive framework of "rap-dominated, singing embellishment", echoing the core concept of "breaking the rules" in the lyrics.

"Pretty Savage" is more than just a pop single, it is a strategic explosion of the K-pop industrial system by new-age music creators. It wraps up the rebellious core with highly industrialized production technology, catering to the "violent aesthetics" demand of the global market, while trying to find a balance between commercialization and artistic expression.

We always talk about the age of pop music. Some songs are arranged ten years ago just by listening to the melody, some are arranged twenty years ago, and some music is produced in recent years.

So what are the main differences? Or how has K-pop improved in recent years compared to 20 years ago?