Cherry Blossom Road

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Review: “Cherry Blossom Road (벚꽃길)” by Jang Yoon-Jeong

This is my first review! I’m excited to share my thoughts on this song, and to begin creating content about trot music.

For this first post, I’ve chosen to review this blog’s namesake: “Cherry Blossom Road” (2017), by Jang Yoon-Jeong.

This is the album art for Cherry Blossom Road.

The best version of the music video available on Youtube is a fan upload with hard-coded Thai subtitles, which I’ve included below. Go ahead and listen!

I love this song. To me, it embodies everything I enjoy about contemporary trot: it’s upbeat, the rhythm and chorus are catchy, and it’s easy to sing along. Even so, the chord progressions and melodic line convey a sense of melancholy.

The title, “Cherry Blossom Road”, evokes beauty, a path covered with light pink flowers, delicate, fragrant, and inviting. There’s a common Korean idiom which basically translates to “walk the flower road”, which is used to convey good wishes for an easy and pleasant path forward. However, the music video for Cherry Blossom Road indicates that the path Jang Yoon-Jeong is on is anything but easy. She goes on a car trip with an unnamed man, and ends up having to do laundry by hand and scrub floors. As these scenes play out, the lyrics lament her state, with her declaring she hates him and that men do not know anything about the struggles of women.

Also, I have to admit, I have trouble telling if the woman in this video is Jang Yoon-Jeong but in makeup unlike any she’s worn at any other point in her career, or if the video producers used an actress as a stand-in and had her lipsync. At various points, she looks more and less like Jang Yoon-Jeong, and I haven’t been able to find any credits for the video. Regardless, the most important aspect here is the song, and what a song it is.

From the opening sounds of a car engine starting to the fade-out of the ending synths, this track is full of energy and character. Jang Yoon-Jeong is at her best when she sings in her lower and medium registers, so the lack of high notes in this song allow her pleasant and distinctively nasal vocal tone to shine. The percussion does what good percussion does best, and keeps the whole track moving along, the rhythm becoming more and more infectious as it progresses. The synths are a sort of cross between glam-pop and Eurodance-esque, and their rounded sounds are pleasant to the ear. “Cherry Blossom Road” is a bit repetitive, but to some extent that’s a feature of trot music. The appeal is less in the lyricism or the emotive vocal delivery, but in the sheer danciness and energy of the track.

Supposedly, the song linked in this post is a remake of one of Jang Yoon-Jeong’s earlier songs by the same title. However, I’ve checked both English and Korean Wikipedias, as well as done some Google searching, and have been unable to find any evidence of this beyond one allkpop.com article announcing the release of this song. If you are able to find the original or prove conclusively that this is not a remake, please let me know!

Song Rating: 9.5/10

Welcome and FAQ!

여러분 안녕하세요! 나는 알렉스입니다! My name is Alex, and welcome to my blog, Cherry Blossom Road. In this post, I’ll explain what I plan to do here and introduce myself a little bit. This will be both a welcome and an FAQ section. I’ll update it with additional information as that becomes necessary. Thank you for reading!

Frequently Asked Questions and General Information

Who are you?

I’m Alex, and I’m a college student from the United States. I don’t want to go into much more detail than that, just for general privacy reasons, but I’ll also add that I am not Korean, and do not speak Korean. I know a few words and maybe a phrase or two, and I can transliterate Hangul, but aside from that, I don’t have any skills in the Korean language. I speak English and Spanish, and I use he/him/his pronouns.

(Side Note: If you’re interested in Korean pop culture and don’t know how to transliterate Hangul, I strongly recommend you learn how to do that. Transliterating just means converting Hangul characters to other written languages. Essentially, it’s knowing that “안녕하세요” is equivalent, more or less, to “annyeonghaseyo”, even if you don’t know that that means “hello.” It’s really easy to pick up and makes it so much easier to find and engage with content. There are plenty of free guides scattered across the internet, and if this blog gets any sort of traction at all and people want links to those resources, I may post some here.)

What is the purpose of this blog?

Here, I plan to review and discuss Korean music, specifically K-pop and Trot. The latter is going to be my main focus, both because I love trot music and because I haven’t found ~~many~~ any English-language sites or resources which dedicate any significant amount of coverage or resources to trot music. I plan on making a post at some point exploring why that is the case. I do also love K-pop, as well as some Western pop, though I want to focus this blog on Korean music for the time being. I may try to keep up with current and new releases, but there’s also so much good music out there which is underappreciated within the K-pop fandom (to say nothing of any trot song which came out before “Love Battery”). I’ll make sure to keep up with tagging and categorizing any posts I publish to keep everything easy to find, or at least I’ll try.

How did you first become interested in K-pop and trot?

The first time I really encountered K-pop (outside of the height of the Gangnam Style meme craze) was when I was on vacation with my family and we stopped at a teppanyaki ice cream restaurant. Inside the restaurant, there was a television set to a channel of music videos (probably Korean MTV or something), and I listened to the song that was playing and decided I liked it. At the end of the video, the artist name and song title were displayed, and I made a mental note to look it up when I got home. That song was “Drama” by 9Muses, and I sort of fell down the K-pop rabbit hole from there. I haven’t gone to any concerts or bought any physical albums, but I’ve followed/been a fan of K-pop since early 2015.

As for when I encountered trot, I was on Youtube one day and turned on autoplay. At one point, it played a music video by an artist I hadn’t heard of named Hong Jinyoung for her song “Thumb Up”, and the instrumentation, arrangement, and singing style were interesting enough to grab my attention. While I wouldn’t call myself an expert or a scholar on either genre of music, I enjoy them both as a casual fan, and want to express that appreciation through a platform like this.

Why did you name your blog “Cherry Blossom Road”?

One of my (and Korea’s) favorite singers, Jang Yoon-Jeong, released a song in 2017 called “Cherry Blossom Road (벚꽃길)”. I first heard it on a random trot Spotify playlist and really enjoyed it, but for some reason, it’s since become a challenge to find on the internet. For some reason, Spotify is missing a huge amount of Jang Yoon-Jeong’s music (as well as a lot of trot/Korean artists in general), including Cherry Blossom Road, which was taken down for reasons I can only fathom. In addition, the music video only exists on Youtube as this fan-uploaded version with hard-coded Thai subtitles. While there are a few music show stages of Jang Yoon-Jeong performing this song, there’s not much, especially given how popular a singer she is. It also doesn’t seem like she performs this song much at concerts or public events.

Basically, my blog title is a tribute of sorts to an absolute gem of a song which, for some reason, seems to be relegated to status as a deep cut in the trot canon. I’ve embedded the Thai-subbed version of the music video below, and I plan on doing a review post of this song, which I’ll link here when it’s published.

I like your reviews, and I have a song, album, or artist I think you should check out. How can make a suggestion to you?

First, thank you for the compliment. Second, you can email me at cherryblossomroad95@gmail.com. If you can include a Youtube or Spotify link to the song, album, or artist you want me to look at, that would be helpful. Please don’t include anything as an attached file, since I won’t open it. If you’d like me to credit you, please include your name or a username, and if I write a review post for your submission, I’ll note that you are the one who suggested I review the subject of the post.

Review: “Not an Easy Girl” (쉬운 여자 아니에요) by Lizzy (feat. Jung Hyung Don)

“Not an Easy Girl” was Lizzy’s first digital single, released in the summer of 2015 when there was still a bit of hope for Orange Caramel and After School. Featuring Jung Hyung Don (best known as one of the former hosts of “Weekly Idol”), it’s a pleasant foray into trot music. I’ve linked the music video below. Go ahead and give it a listen!

Just to clear something up at the beginning of this review, Lizzy now uses the name Park Soo-Ah to promote as an actress and entertainer. Since this song was released when she was still promoting as Lizzy, I’ll use that name in the article, but I’ll tag this review with both names to reflect that. In the future, if she releases music as Park Soo-Ah, those reviews will only be tagged with Park Soo-Ah.

The music video for Not an Easy Girl features Lizzy and Jung Hyung Don edited into the 1961 movie Seong Chunhyang, about a love story between members of the nobility which goes awry. According to some Youtube comments, it’s actually a better viewing experience to watch this music video on a lower quality setting such as 144p or 240p, since it makes it harder to tell that Lizzy has been green-screened in. There’s also speculation that this may have been a cheaper alternative to filming a completely new music video, since Lizzy’s agency at the time, Pledis Entertainment, was having financial issues.

Not an Easy Girl is somewhat of a standard trot song crossed with elements of mid-2010s idol pop. The most notable influences from standard pop music are the prevalence of brass and horns in the instrumental, and the inclusion of a rap verse. While traditional and contemporary trot music can and often do feature brass instrumental layers, there tends to be more of an emphasis on string instruments than is present here.

One key detail of Not an Easy Girl is the use of whisper-like backing vocals in the introduction and to end the instrumental breaks. These contrast with Lizzy’s fuller, deeper singing in the main vocal line. Lizzy’s stylistic choices in this song are more in line with what would be expected in mainstream pop, rather than in trot. She does not use the typical wide, warbling vibrato typical of many trot singers, and her vocals in the last line of the song are almost belted. I do not mean this as a criticism, merely an observation. There’s almost a sense of campiness to the song, from the way Lizzy sings the hook in the chorus to Jung Hyung Don’s rap verse. Speaking of that rap verse, it does not seem out of place in the overall structure of the song, and in fact does a nice job of breaking up the sameness of the sound and thus avoiding the repetitive nature of most trot songs. It doesn’t hurt that lyrically, Jung Hyung Don is offering a rebuttal to Lizzy’s characterization by proclaiming himself to not be an easy guy.

Overall, Not an Easy Girl is a generally fun trot song, even if the composition is rather standard. Lizzy acquits herself decently well, and Jung Hyung Don’s feature is fun and gives the track a jolt of energy at just the right time.

Song Rating: 7.8/10