Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
After a successful guest spot on Yezi‘s “Sse Sse Sse“, KittiB is back with her own music in “Doin’ Good” featuring Verbal Jint.
Despite initial excitement about the concept, the teaser made me anticipate disliking the song because I thought she was gonna be going full yolosweg trap. However, the actual instrumental was a lot better than I anticipated, maintaining the serious and somber mood but still keeping an edge.
While the sing-songy auto-tuned chorus threw me off at times, it wasn’t enough of a distraction to detract from KittiB and Verbal Jint both bringing their ‘A’ game for this track. Perhaps the biggest fear was that her and Verbal Jint were going to regress and adopt a yolosweg flow to ride the trend, like seemingly 90% of Korean hip-hop nowadays, but the implementation of trap worked because they generally stuck with what they did best.
Both of their performances were impressive, yet it’s the subject matter tackled that was a significant part of the reason I was really feeling this. The topic and lyrics were executed in a very real, very raw, and very personal way — something a lot of rappers arguing about what ‘real hip-hop’ is could learn from — with KittiB rapping about how a man once broke her down and made her feel worthless, as the music video shows images of a man violently beating a woman. KittiB talks about overcoming her self-doubt and becoming self-reliant, rapping, “I won’t be looking for myself in others, so focus, and let the mirror reflect, trust the person standing there, I will win it all.” The ending message, of course, is that she’s the one coming out on top now, and that despite everything, she’s “Doin’ Good”.
I’ve always thought KittiB was on the precipice in that she had a lot of the ingredients to be a successful and quality rapper, but nothing truly grabbed me about what she was doing musically. But bringing “Doin’ Good” to a mainstream audience has definitely turned me into a fan, and it seems that the more I listen to the song, the better it gets.
“In me I trust, I’m doing fine without you.“
