Born in New York City in 2001, Jiwon was raised against a backdrop of diverse music, his father’s love of bands like The Clash, and his mother’s focus on classical training. Having developed his skills playing the piano, cello, bass guitar, and drums, music became Jiwon’s principal form of self-expression.
Jiwon’s music sees him draw on inspiration as diverse and Lou Reed and Jai Paul, with the latter’s pop experimentation clearly audible on Please Please Please, a cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s hit single.
It’s rare that I would choose to feature a cover version of a record that is just a few months old, but what Jiwon does to Carpenter’s original is both transformational and complimentary. Where Sabrina’s original is a lilting country-influenced vehicle for snappy percussion and vocal harmonies, Jiwon creates a version that is soaked in soft-focus instrumentation and dubby, electronic synths. Jiwon’s vocal has a hurt, hollow feel to it, and where Carpenter sounds hopeful that she will escape romantic embarrassment, Jiwon sounds like he has already dealt with more than one dose of it.
Overall, Jiwon takes Sabrina Carpenter’s commercial-yet-intelligent single and turns it into a lesson in art-pop artifice, his throbbing synths and swirling melodies equal to those of Jai Paul and Dev Hynes.