I recently started a long leg of business travel. While it can sometimes be interesting and even a little bit exciting, business travel is, on the whole, Bad — you have to leave all of your comfortable spaces to spend way too much time with strangers doing strange things, and the outcomes are completely unpredictable. In my Day Job line of work, in fact, of the three main kinds of business travel that you usually have to do, only one of them is guaranteed to have no worse an experience than net neutral. Those aren’t great odds!
The upshot of business travel, though, is that you usually have time on your hands. This most recent trip (which was fine) was busy all over the middle, but also had long travel legs at each end, and I got to use those long travel legs to go back over music, new and old, that I both needed and wanted to listen to.
While returning home (finally) the other night, the very last thing that I put on was a recent favorite, uijin’s stay hungry, stay foolish, a really solid album with great energy that, much like the idols who made it, seemed to fly under the radar too much last year. And I thought, man, what’s uijin even doing now?
As it turns out, they’re putting together slick live videos!
This one’s from almost two weeks ago now, but who’s counting?
And while we’re at it, here’s a clip of them at a pretty familiar-looking venue, no?
— uijin (@uijin_official) July 8, 2018
I don’t mind saying out loud that uijin is simultaneously one of the best things in idol and one of the least satisfying things in idol. That’s often a plaintive way of saying “empty calories,” but the reality is the reverse: uijin isn’t a hot fudge sundae when what you need is a nice, square meal; uijin is more going to Ruth’s Chris for great steak, but only getting a 4 oz cut. Since the release of stay hungry, stay foolish a year ago, they’ve released but one single, and that back at the turn of the year. At least they’ll be at TIF!
We need more of you, uijin, and we need it now. You’re too dang good to not be a major focal point for every person who comes at idol with a sincere desire to hear new and different and interesting things. Maybe, just like the last time that I did one of these live appreciations, you too will release something major within a week’s time.
