How YG Entertainment owned and crushed 2014

If we’re talking K-pop, 2014 belonged to YG. While the competition suffered from crumbling groups and lawsuit mutinies, YG Entertainment made it tough to count all the ways they got it right. 

Most importantly, YG spent 2014 releasing some phenomenal music. 

While full-length albums tend to be the exception in Korea, YG released no less than five chart-topping LPs this year.

But before Winner came RISE, Taeyang’s moody second record. The 26-year-old R&B singer first came to light as a member of the super massive boy group Big Bang—you may have recently spotted him tearing it up with bandmate G-Dragon for their club trap smash “Good Boy”—but for his solo career he’s exploring a sound that’s more akin to Miguel and Frank Ocean.

“Honestly, I think a focused sound is overrated,” he says, calling to mind the driving post-rock guitars and arena dubstep drums of his personal favorite on the album, Love You To Death. Still, it was YG’s commitment to Taeyang’s favorite sound as a kid that convinced him to sign up at the age of thirteen.

“There’s only one major label focused on hip-hop and R&B in Korea with a more urban sound and creative space,” he says. “Back when I first joined YG it was even more urban than it is today, with its roots deep in hip-hop and R&B. So it was the only option for me.”

That R&B core is the very mortar of “Eyes, Nose, Lips,” which just won song of the year at Hong Kong’s prestigious Mnet Asian Music Awards. Above mournfully wandering piano changes, Taeyang ruminates on the features of a lost love as he and the arrangement build gracefully towards one of the most well-deserved key change catharses of the year. The beautiful music video accents the effect, revolving around a one-shot D’Angelo tribute that manages to surprise without ever losing its sense of understatement.

Selling over 1.5 million copies and topping both Korea’s Gaon and Billboard’s K-pop charts, the track was so successful that YG launched a supply of official covers to keep the hype train in motion.

(parts of the article were omitted)

source: Vice Manazine via PlanetYB