India is listening to J-Hope and Becky G’s Chicken Noodle Soup

J-Hope, one of South Korean boy band BTS’ rappers, and Becky G, a Mexican-American hip hop musician, have reworked the original song for 2019. While the song’s original hook of “chicken noodle soup with a soda on the side” is kept, everything else has been more or less changed. The song sees original verses from J-Hope in Korean and from Becky G in Spanish.

The song’s beat stays bass-heavy pretty much throughout with long, sustained bass drones in the verses. The verses’ bass-heavy nature is broken only by a shiny, pop hook sung by Becky G. Every switch to that hook sounds jarring. For a song whose focus is on incredibly rhythmic verses and a minimal beat, a pop hook with greater melodic focus sounds somewhat out of place. It’s not terrible to hear or anything, it just sounds disjointed in the context of the song.

The 2019 rework of “Chicken Noodle Soup” is especially interesting because it takes a song that was lauded for its representation of hip-hop culture in Harlem and broadens it to show the space hip-hop occupies on a global scale. This is a fun and catchy song that when you stop to think about, shows just how far-reaching hip-hop has become.

Who Will Love It: BTS fans, fans of Becky G, people who danced to the original.

The Good: The verses, the beat through the verses.

The Bad: The weird pop hook that seems like it came out of nowhere.

The Verdict: It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the languages in this song. It is still fun to listen to.