2020: A Year in Review for Music

2020 has been a crazy year. I do not think many alive at the moment would remember the 1918 Influenza outbreak, so COVID-19 may have been the biggest disease outbreak in their memory. Stuck in our homes, I felt down at times and I am certain some of my readers have too. Music helped me through, and I am sure it helped others too. I began to discover European and Japanese pop this year and revisited old favorites in Hindi, English, Chinese, and Korean. At the same time, 2020 featured a host of great new releases. I will not call it an overall perfect year, but there was a lot of good stuff. Rather than look over 2020 music as a big bundle, I thought it best to have sub-sections for each region. I have not done so for Kazakhstan, China nor the European countries, as I do not really know those places' music history to make any comparison.

K-Pop (Korean Music):

For many years, K-Pop was my ultimate source of music, I listened near-exclusively to K-Pop. And since that time, I think 2020 is the year where K-Pop contributed the lowest to my listening. That does not mean it had a bad year though, I just began to check out new songs. The first half of the year was oddly quiet, with good releases coming weeks apart from each other, this is why I began to listen to new music. The over-indulgence in trap beats hurt many songs, and vocal-processing was much more terrible than ever before. The only reason I did not completely fall out of love with K-Pop during this time was due to the great songwriting by Edenary, Frants, and Monotree. There were some other good songs during this era, but from artists with a budget smaller than a high-school project.

Speaking of low-budget, what has happened to the K-Indie scene? 2019 hinted at a creative revival as Bewhy, BOL4, and others all released successful and unique songs. In 2020, almost all indie songs were aiming to follow the "I'm am cool" trend with trap hip-hop, or they attempted to go viral. For a sub-section known for its uniqueness, how come it was such a dull year for Korean Indie music?

The second half of the year was dominated by the retro trend. Which went full-on 80s for the girls and 70s for the boys. While it started out with unique ideas, it soon turned into simple catchy commercial tracks, spearheaded by BTS's surprisingly good Dynamite. This was, however, where uniqueness came back to K-Pop. I think the real return was through two non-retro songs. The BLSSD produced One (Lucid Dream) and the Hwang Hyun produced New World. Of those two, New World was a hit, and allowed a small niche of Korean songs to try weird and unique stuff.

I cannot talk about 2020 K-Pop without mentioning how successful it has become. By this point, I have heard Dynamite in the weirdest of places (religious groups, background music to YouTube channels, it is omnipresent). Still, the K-Pop I enjoyed the most did not reach any level of mega-hit success. Leaving me in a mix between hopeful and worried for 2021 in K-Pop.

Score: B-

J-Pop (Japanese Music)

J-Pop had an incredible 2020, the sort of 2020 anyone would crave to have. J-Pop was in some sort of Shangri-La, where the music could top charts while still being unique.

It was not rare to hear interesting lyrics, conceptual uniqueness, orchestral and operatic influences in chart-topping songs. And I credit this to Johnny's Entertainment. SixTONES had an incredible 2020, and Snow Man seems a great promise for the future. Established acts such as King & Prince and Sexy Zone expanded on their sounds with surprising maturity and clarity. And Arashi had the best farewell year they could have wanted (minus their tours being canceled of course, that sucked).

This spread to other artists too. Solo artists Reol, Yonezu Kenshi and Miyavi could not have asked for better 2020s, moving from strong single and album to strong single and album. There were also some surprisingly great b-sides this year. Also, Tatsuya Komuro is back, and that means more techno-rock goodness! Oh, and do not get me started on the masterpiece that is Official Hige Dandism's Laughter.

If I was nit-picky, I could find some flaws with the high-pitch vocals of some girl groups, which really do not make them count as music. Plus, some of the anime rock tracks were generic. But 2020 provided me enough J-Pop songs that were great that I could ignore the rest.

Score: A

Indian Music

Well, this was a weird one.

For those unitiated, Bollywood seems to have been going through a creative drought over the last few years. A look at any soundtrack would show that there is an unprecedented amount of remakes going around. It is not weird if one or two year old songs are remade, or songs being remade multiple times in a year. Anyway, the early months of 2020 were choke-fulled with remakes. There were more remakes than one could count. Still, we got a surprising list of good, new songs. Love Aaj Kal sampled old classics at times, but was mostly new stuff, and good at that. And the remake Street Dancer 3D soundtrack showed that even remakes need not suck.

The real standout at this time. though, was the Telugu music. The Ala Vaikunthapuramaloo soundtrack was full with fresh ideas, and it had a song do pretty well on my upcoming countdown. In fact, the whole soundtrack was solid, with each adding another dimension. Then we have songs like Neeli Neeli Aakasam, and you would feel that 2020 will be a great year for Indian music.

Then, the pandemic hit. As Indian music is tied strongly to the film industry, things fell apart ridiculously quickly. All eyes then turned to the new generation of solo stars in India from the Hindi speaking and Punjabi speaking regions to deliver.

First let us look at the Punjabi scene. Over the last past few years, the Punjabi music influence and success has grown exponentially to the point that Bollywood songs that were not remakes were based on the Punjabi style. There is nothing wrong with this, it is just that any other style of music seemed to evaporate. Still, the Punjabi solo scene has provided some great songs recently. 2019 showed that it was more than just Guru Randhawa, and things were looking up due to new breakout stars. In 2020, those breakout stars all crashed in momentum. Jass Manak is a good example. Butterfly was a hit (though no Lehenga), but the quality was much lower. Honey Singh and Badshah had hits, but the quality was lower than anything they had previously released. Why do you want to listen to songs that basically clones English rap or pop when you can listen to the original which is better?

On the Hindi solo front, things were slightly less hopeless. Thankfullt, a rock trend is seeming to emerge here slowly, which I hope replaces the dull trendy R & B trend (I love R & B, but you can only listen to it so much), and slowly leads to the resurgence of classical Indian instrumentation. Still, the majority of the releases were the lifeless trendy songs, lacking any uniqueness. Darshan Raval seems to be wanting to try new things, but he is alone in this sentiment. The Kakkar siblings have mastered the best ways to follow the trends, but they could clearly try unique stuff with their success and succeed.

On the film front, we had the Tanhaji and Love Aaj Kal soundtrack to keep Bollywood music from dying. Later, when films came back, only A. R. Rahman's Dil Bechara soundtrack managed to get more than one play. On the Telugu front, there were some excellent releases in the first two months of the year (though nothing touched the Bahubali soundtracks in any way, I reccoment everyone to listen to it at least once, it is an experience to not be missed). Thing reached a dead-stop after this. But this small section saved Indian music from reaching a D- score.

Score: C

ABC Music (American, British, Canadian Music)

I think I made a new term! ABC is a great way to describe the similar music of these countires.

After years of being stuck in the trap loop, the quarantine forced the ABC countries' music scene to diversify. This was led by The Weeknd's Blinding Lights. I would be surprised if you have never heard the song, it is like mentioned everywhere. This song defined 2020 for many, and is omnipresent. Later on, Dua Lipa revived disco, and the retro trend began to compete with the trap trend. This led to 2020's music scene being very divided.

Funnily enough, the best ABC songs were commonly neither retro nor trap. Lady Gaga and Everything Everything are good examples of this. Despite this, the more mainstream the song this year, the less I liked it. Neil Young and Lady Gaga's albums were exceptions.

In the end, after a drought, I feel that 2020 was a step in the right direction for the ABC countries. They might not be there yet, but they will be soon.

Score: C-

Image Source: Coastal Courier