Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Monsta X returned today with “Fighter“, which is a typically high energy release from them that also ended up coming across with a tinge of nostalgia for me.
The chorus to “Fighter” basically sounds like something that could’ve been on the soundtrack of any number of 80s action/martial arts flicks, preferably used during some kind of training montage. Thus, I enjoyed this because I lowkey like those kinds of messes, and this came off like something you could throw onto a gym playlist or something.
The rock stylings of the instrumental were a definite positive and helped provide a nice underlying beat to ride throughout. The verses were aggressive but appropriately volumed down to allow for the quality of the chorus to have the maximum impact, which I thought was the correct choice when there was likely temptation to just go all loud all the time. The transition from the chorus to the second verse of the horn leading into the ring bell was another nice touch that helped sell it, though unlike a lot of their other tracks, I felt like the rapping almost fell into the background a bit.
I’m not sure if “Fighter” is necessarily the best pop track, but it’s definitely fun as hell to listen to.
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The music video? Eh…
It starts off on a solid note, putting Monsta X’s name in a title card from ‘Stranger Things‘.
But I was sorta disappointed that this just wasn’t like a glorified montage from ‘Rocky‘ or something, and instead we get some kind of bizarre sci-fi thing that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense one way or the other to me. I get the ‘Stranger Things’ connection, so maybe one side is the real world and one side is the upside down, but if that was what the director intended, then it wasn’t really explored properly.
Also, it’s generally hard to take a concept seriously when it has Jooheon doing this.
I’m all for complex concepts, but if it’s just complex and there isn’t a cohesive narrative that lets the viewer in on it, then it’s just a random mess more than anything. K-pop music videos that try to be deep suffer from this a lot, and it seems like “Fighter” went down that route.
But putting all that aside, the main problem with the music video was that it doesn’t go with the song at all.
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Overall, “Fighter” would’ve been better off with a basic music video than whatever they ended up actually doing, because it only served to detract from what the song was doing in the end. Despite that, it was a fun and entertaining listen throughout even if I didn’t think it was necessarily an earworm type of pop track.
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‘The Clan – Guilty’
“Fighter”
