sticker is an oddity. its album has sold millions of copies, it’s nct’s most-awarded song and nctizens and critics alike generally favor it. but it also serves as a byword for worst song in kpop on the site formerly known as twitter dot com. which matters more than any real life success, probably. so what’s the disconnect?

i really like the song, for what it’s worth. to the joker (me), sticker is a normal song. and i want you to hold hands in a circle with me and join me on this journey of jokerification. that’s my general project for this piece. it’s teasing apart the song through analyzing its producer, and his history, as a love letter to this polarizing song and its creator. let’s go.

sticker opens with a one-by-one introduction of its most iconic parts: the grating flute riff that will come to bounce and trill over the vocals, the warped bass that see-saws and provides a humming, almost-ominous background, and the thunking percussion. it sounds really big and busy for how empty it is. taeyong raps over the cacophony, “i got what you need, pick what you want and stick it on.” he’s fast and rhythmic, punctuating his lines with bangs and whoops.

the vocalists come in after his verse: doyoung with a bombastic BABY! and droning yea-yea-yeahs after each of his lilting upward lines, then jaehyun, jungwoo, and haechan following in quick succession as piano finally enters the song, adding in a brief backbone. the piano gives way to strings and a drilling fast drum beat and, of course, more members. i give up on listing who’s singing at any given part.

now, the chorus. i don’t want my enjoyment of this song to come off as cerebral. i like it because i like dancing to it. and the chorus is the heart of that. we’re back to that empty bass and flute combo, with nct somehow implausibly forming a coherent melody on top of it, which alternates with the reminder that their love is “like a stickerrrr, stickerrr, stickerrr.”

the bridge sounds almost cluttered, without the silence that’s become a friend to you over the course of the song. that’s right. you’ve been frogboiled. that empty, repetitive, dissonant chorus’ return is a joy. it just makes sense.

anyway. this sound all starts with one man: dem jointz. that’s right. the INCOMINGGGG! guy. he’s an american producer who made the jump to kpop, and he’s come to define nct’s signature sound via their eclectic title tracks. but before he was mayor of ncity, he had a long career in american pop that i wanna start with. come on a journey through time with me, to….

2011: Cockiness (Love It)



in dem jointz’ first hit, rihanna coaxes the listener to “suck my cockiness, lick my persuasion” over chopped and looped vocalizations off of stuck on you’s greg kinnear cover of summertime. it’s all clicky drums and endless chup chup ch wups with occasional variations of horns and whoops of YOUUUUUU.

one thing we know dem jointz added to the song is the bit where rihanna chants “i love it, i love it, i love it when you eat it, i love it when you eat it, i love it when you eat it” again and again, a hypnotic cooing mantra over that same beat, filling it out and making it throb.

the producer bangladesh commented in a mtv interview:

"It wasn't 'Cockiness' at first, it was something else. They had the 'I love it' part. ... [They] came up with that part first, and that wasn't even on that track. It was just an idea."

"I was going to make a whole new beat out of it, what they wrote to it that day, it wasn't really all the way done. A couple days later, they revisited it and came up with the 'Cockiness'."[1]

consider the parallels to the “roll up to the party, roll up roll up to the party” section. [2] it’s clear dem jointz is interested in mirroring the vocals and beats to play with the empty space that results in the absence of any backing harmony. it’s fun! it’s interesting! it’s catchy!

2015: Genocide



the beat is dem jointz’ contribution, we know, and it’s also the beat that sold dr. dre on tapping dem jointz for the compton project in the first place.[3] which makes sense, because from the crunchy open, this beat is so delightfully nasty. it’s pounding and ready to blow out your speakers. twinkling notes scale up and down along with marsha ambrosius’ hook. candice pillay takes the bridge, with off kilter vocals, all raspy reggae flow. in an interview, she relayed that dem jointz actually instructed her to rap with a cold and ignore the beat.[4] that drive is sticker-esque. to ME.

the rap verses themself are great, of course. but i won’t credit that to dem jointz necessarily. dre still has it, rapping in cascade “I could just bury ‘em, bury 'em / cause delirium, mass hysteria, no scarier area” over that piano from the hook. and kendrick lamar sounds phenomenal here, spitting, “fuck your blessing, fuck your life, fuck your hope / fuck your mama. fuck your daddy, fuck your dead homie.”

the song is just clever and fun and weird and deconstructed with a barbershop quartet harmonizing “murder” transitioning to a deflated balloon sounding beat. it’s definitely dre in its level of polish, but i think it shows off really nicely how dem jointz is able to adapt his sound and push the envelope with established artists, anticipating him being totally let loose with nct.

2020: Nah Nah Nah



just the year before sticker’s release, dem jointz was already flirting with annoying flutes. a lot of people attribute that to kanye being um. mentally where kanye was at in 2020, but i see it as a joint effort.

there’s a pounding rhythm that gets rushed along by the flute, forming a dissonant and frenetic beat that slowly gets darker and warped, building up to a scream before returning to the original flute. kanye sounds off tempo over it. it sounds sloppy, weird and empty. but it verges on really interesting with its dizzying tune, like erraticism as an artform.

it’s not sticker—yet. but it’s clear that dem jointz is playing around with how far he can go. he’s on record as saying that the song IS just a demo that kanye was passionate about, so the messiness makes sense.[5] but it’s really cool to see him evolve.

dem jointz was making kpop since 2015, beginning with red velvet’s don’t u wait no more. but he began to bring more of his sound to bear in his work with exo. cloud 9, ya ya ya, and obsession all are great examples of this. and his public commentary on his work with exo is illuminating.



here's him talking about obsession to billboard. i'll let him say it in his own words:

I love to oxymoron my music to where it’s like, you’re talking about love and hope for tomorrow, but then the music sounds like sorrow and anger. Gotta give them that contrast sometimes! [...]

The beat that I wanted to create, I definitely wanted to have a piercing sample of some sort that repeats over and over and over again — I didn’t necessarily know what it was gonna be. The “I want you” part is what I was really looking for. Didn’t know that it was actually gonna be “I want you” — I just wanted something to be piercing and repetitive, and then I’ll make the track over that. [...]

During the verses and the B section, there’s a rhythm-type grungy guitar loop. It’s not even to where it really has too much of a melody, it just [growling noises] — it just does something like that! But you know how certain instruments, whether it makes sense or not, sometimes give you a feeling. Those are the things that you can’t ignore — if it gives you a feeling, it’s probably supposed to be there. During the rhythm of that track, it probably gives everyone that same feeling it gave me when I created it. It didn’t make any sense to me, but it felt good, you know what I mean? [6]

he's talking about a totally different track, but i do think it does show the common threads in his approach-- sharp contrasts between lyrics and sound, piercing and repetitive samples that form the backbone of a track, and avoiding clear melodies in favor of memorable and polarizing emotional response. and i think all of that is really clear in his music.

i want to highlight here that sticker has clear antecedents even in the band’s own discography.



cherry bomb opens with pulsating echoing screeches which turn into a scratchy bassline. its lyrics are repetitive and tunelessly shouting. it sounds sterile and industrial; it sounds messy and explosive. there’s beeps and sirens and then boom—it resolves into a jazzy melodic version of what you’ve been hearing the whole time for the bridge. it finishes by building and coming full circle to that original wailing beat. it’s really good pop, in case you can’t tell. this is the kind of sound that’s come to define nct.

and dem jointz’ dna being all over it is no accident. he commented in an interview:

“It’s super dope, that you’re helping craft the sound…and that they’re actually staying loyal to the sound, and they’re following the vision. It just goes to show that they have the same vision and we all are on the same page in terms of where we’re trying to go,” he said. [7]

we’re ALL onboard the sticker train, basically.

and i want to finish this discussion where it all started: the demo, aka jack move by calixte. for the record, i like the actual song more than the demo (if for no other reason than that it’s better mixed) but it’s interesting to see the bones of the song to come.

after all this time spent listening to other, non-sticker songs, we can return to the original and appreciate the polish added in the final version, but also its similarities and differences with the tracks preceding it. i’m not arguing that sticker is the culmination of dem jointz’ career, by the way. i don’t like the song THAT much. i think he’s got way more to give. i’m just trying to contextualize where the song came from in terms of the artistic career of the man most defining of its sound.

anyway, a final note on the demo: the original lyrics go “it’s a stickup” which makes like. so much more sense. let nct rap about armed robbery. literally stealing someone’s girl. that’s fine with me.

i hope you enjoyed listening to some music with me!