OK, enough of this silliness, but having brought it up, might as well wrap it up. And thanks to the internet, SNSD's Letterman performance was online in hours:

Sunny looks hilarious in her opening pose while Letterman is wrapping up with Regis and Bill Murray. I have a feeling Sunny's English isn't good enough to understand anything they're saying, so she doesn't know when they're going to start.

It's an impressive performance, probably the best one I've seen, no doubt in no small part because they re-tooled the song to incorporate live drums, keyboards and a DJ (I don't know if that's a requirement for performing on Letterman, it may be. I can't think of any performance on Letterman that used playback. But since K-pop is based on playbacks, maybe this was the compromise).

The performance just feels much more visceral than their Korean TV promotions, and the added dance break in the middle also helps the energy. The live bass drum adds bottom-end oomph to make up for the lack of bass on the recording, which was my major pet peeve. And this broadcast also makes me realize how crappy the camera work is on the Korean TV shows. This is like the best I've seen for a Korean idol group. Ever.

Like I've said a hundred times already, I didn't think the song was great, but after hearing it dozens of times through their promotions, I've gotten used to it and there are some elements that are catchy.

That's not saying much though since there have been other groups with songs that I absolutely hated when they started promotions, but then by the time they ended a month or two later, I would love the song and be a fan.

And I take back what I said before, if I never came to Asia and gotten into K-pop, and if my first exposure was seeing this, I would probably have been intrigued enough to look them up. Of course, that's based on the energy and the live musicians, but the hook would've been in.

One thing I wouldn't have been doing is the K-pop geeking out thing and noticing things like how close Sunny gets to Paul Shafer's keyboard. And that melding of something that is very familiar to me from my past with something I'm currently unreasonably fanatical about is still very weird.