On “Smile! You’re On Camera”, Juju B. Goode Chooses Adventure
The singer-songwriter and producer’s debut album reinterprets K-Pop from his childhood, and defies categorization.
In the early days, K-Pop was best known for its melodrama. It wasn’t just in the ballads, which often featured a lethal combination of piano and guitar to portray heartache, but in the pure pop music, too. No matter what the style was, Korean singers often pushed their voices to a near guttural wail. Listen to Park Mi Kyung’s “Eve’s Warning” for the best example of this. Even as her voice reaches a wail that sounds primal, the production encourages you to dance harder. To new listeners, this version of K-Pop often sounds rougher than the slickly produced tracks released today, which is true. This music, particularly from the nineties, reflected a generation that was brimming with possibility after finally separating from decades of cultural trauma. Yet by 1997, Korea was in the midst of another unprecedented injury: near economic collapse. If the singers sounded unhinged, well, look back at the country’s history.
K-Pop today doesn’t employ such messy emotions. Instead, companies have swapped this volatility for a saccharine perfectionism. The problem with K-Pop now is that there is very little space to look back or to question what came before. But Juju B. Goode, an LA-based Korean singer-songwriter and producer, just might be the one Korean artist willing to go there. He grew up listening to this music in the late nineties, and his debut album “Smile! You’re On Camera”, released today, presents perhaps the most ambitious interpretation of what K-Pop means to us.
“This album is my own take on K-Pop because to me, K-Pop has always been a salad bowl of all this different type of music,” Juju told me in August as he was putting the finishing touches on this album. Stylistically, it’s a tribute to this music and the Korean performers who came before him, with added inspiration drawn from unusual places, too, like K-Rock, reggae and hip-hop. It’s a hi-octane, adventurous record with Juju shocking life into a genre that is often uniform in the music it produces.
“Smile! You’re On Camera” is built from the quarter-life crisis of “Mr. Lee”, a character that Juju created while living in New York City during the pandemic. Mr. Lee, Juju imagined, was a salesman pulling all-nighters while trying to become a star. “Couldn’t you slow down?”, folks ask him. But Mr. Lee has too much to accomplish and Juju, too, felt that he had no time to stop. Being a working artist meant flooring the gas pedal and seizing the moment. Halfway through writing “Mr. Lee”, Juju realized that, really, the song is about himself.
In 2021, Juju relocated to California where he began to work in earnest on the album. Over the next year and a half, the songs began to come together into a half-autobiographical, half-conceptual album. “Smile!”, then, tracks how it feels to chase those dreams in your late 20s, while dealing with burnout and grappling with grief.
This is not a conventional album, and it’s one that demands your attention. Thanks to its clever production, “Smile!” plays like a memory that, if you’re of a certain age, will bring you back to a time when Saturday mornings were every day. But what makes “Smile!” such a compelling album is how Juju is one of the first K-Pop artists to reinterpret the genre’s early sounds into something modern and familiar. He even gets the voice right: He growls and snarls just like the ‘90s K-Pop idols, but he can also be softly sweet. Songs take you on unexpected rides as they mutate into entirely new sounds midway though. “Smile!”, the opener, is a great example of this. To those aware of K-Pop’s history, his references will feel masterful, but even taken on its own merit, “Smile!” is a whimsical oddity that sets the listener up for the upcoming journey.
Juju is an intelligent curator here: meticulously creating bridges between niche references to the past with explosive exploration of present genres. Perhaps most admiringly, he’s not afraid to try something that could be polarizing. “Ending Fairy”, a single released earlier this year about screen fatigue, is one of my favorite tracks because of its rolling percussion. “Salsa on a Highway”, which concludes Side A, is by far one of the most ambitious and unstructured tracks Juju has ever produced. It is an immediate standout.
But halfway through the album, as Side B begins, the long-awaited heartache arrives and the mood shifts. Only one ballad is included on “Smile!” but its placement is well-deserved: in the center of the story, right in the very heart of things. Following “Cameo”, where Juju writes about the end of a relationship, “Witness” explores stages of grief. You might believe this is when the real dramatic flair appears, but it’s a bait-and-switch. Here, Juju’s voice is so small that he almost sounds distorted. In this instance, the melodrama isn’t in his voice like you expect from traditional Korean ballads, but in the production. In the final minute, the drums kick in, and Juju’s voice warps as he sings, “I’m sorry that you had to go”. Suddenly, the song becomes a dance floor to mourn what is lost.
For most of the album, Juju seems to be wrestling with the demands of a culture that prioritizes putting on a fake smile to get on with life. “Smile! You’re on camera” the gas station sign reads. It’s a form of surveillance that we feel constantly, even when we’re not being told so directly. We say it to ourselves when we’re out at dinner and the phones come out for photos, or when we see an old ex and need to look our best. But as Juju begins to accept what’s left, he seems to ask, what if we can just be who we are?
“Sometimes I find myself lost in the wilderness and I hear you went away to find yourself somewhere,” Juju sings on “Lost in Translation”. But that’s okay, he decides. “I won’t fall apart in the sadness.” Maybe the bravest thing he admits on “Smile! You’re on Camera” is that it’s okay to not smile at all. Sometimes we just need a good cry.
