APT.

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My cover of the incredibly catchy K-pop mega-hit, APT., by Rosé and Bruno Mars. It recently was the most popular song in the world — the #1 song on the Billboard Global 200 chart from November 2, 2024 to January 21, 2025 (and currently the #1 song on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart) — and it is part of a trend of 80's style songs in current pop music, I'm delighted to say! I'm also delighted to be doing a cover of a song that is very popular right now.

"K-pop" is "Korean pop", but the only Korean you need to know is 아파트 (apateu) which is an "English loan" word meaning "apartment" (hence the song's title, APT.).

Musical influences. If you listen carefully, you can hear quite a few musical influences in this song! Here are a few.

The most obvious is the drum track, which was sampled from Toni Basil's 1981 hit, Mickey, and is included in the writing credits for the song. Both songs have a "spoken chant" at their core: a cheerleading chant in Mickey and the repeated word, 아파트, in APT., taken from a popular Korean drinking game.

The influence of Blondie's 1978 hit, One Way or Another (a great song, by the way!) — and Debbie Harry's "getcha getcha getcha" — is also unmistakable:

The last 30 seconds of the song are accompanied by a beautiful melody with an Oriental influence (in its almost exclusive use of the five-note pentatonic scale). I've stripped away the other vocals so you can hear that melody more clearly:

Finally, the catchy melody of the pre-chorus has many precursors:

Thanks to Jarred Jermaine for locating these audio samples of similar earlier songs. Here is what you are listening to in the above audio clip:

1. the prechorus of APT.
2. Troye Sivan, One of Your Girls (2023)
3. The Vamps, Can We Dance (2013)
4. Lady Gaga, Judas (2011)
5. Ava Max, So Am I (2019)
6. One Direction, Night Changes (2014)

The song intro. The song begins with an introduction (in Korean) to the Korean drinking game, APT, chanted by a group of Korean girls:

채영이가 좋아하는 (Chaeyoung's favorite)
랜덤게임 (random game)
랜덤게임 (random game)
Game start!

("Chaeyoung" is Rosé's actual name.) When I did this cover, I didn't have access to any Korean speakers (female or male) to record. And I didn't want to attempt to speak the intro in Korean myself. I considered using the translation of the Korean into English, but it doesn't translate very well. ("Random game, random game" is not terribly catchy!). So I finally went with making up my own "opening chant/game instructions" in English:

This is the start
Of a game called "Heart".
Now go play your part. . .
Game on!

Cover art. I went with a simple concept for the cover art:

I first considered a cover with a man and woman engaging in one or more of the activities Bruno sings about: "drink, dance, smoke, freak, party". But I wasn't satisfied with anything as obvious as that. So instead I turned my focus to the "elephant in the room": the room itself. . . in other words, the apartment, which is, in some sense, the song's star, as it is the title of the song, as well as the chorus of the song. The song gives the apartment an almost magical status: over and over it says, "Just meet me at the APT." and implies magic will occur! So the cover is a picture of that moment when they come together in the apartment, and have set aside their phones (through which they've been sending each other affectionate emojis), just before all the magic begins. I don't mind that the cover further hints at the full moon as adding to the magic of the APT. — the full moon is famous for making people "go crazy" (engaging in "lunacy"), as the song's lyrics admonish: "sleep tomorrow but tonight go crazy".