SM pulled a new one October 31st. They teamed the (in theory) best dancers of their company into one group and made a car commercial music video song thing. I'm not 100% sure on it, but I do know that Hyundai had a hand in the music video.
The combination group, formed by members of Super Junior, Super Junior-M (Yes! Canada respresented), Girls Generation, SHINee, and EXO (M and K. Yay.), is called the hard to take seriously name Younique Unit. Now, many people may think that it is unique because it does what Korean groups don't; have men and women sing and dance together. However, that is false. Anyone remember Speed? That was a male group singing with a member of T-ara. Or what about Kim Wan Seon and Yong Jun Hyeong's song Be Quiet? Or the actual group that is permanently three guys and one woman? Mixing the sexes is in fact not new, so what is younique about the SM group? I'm thinking that they are unique for SM and that's why they were named Younique Unit. They focus on rap and dance, and other than having both sexes in the group, they have both Chinese and Korean members. They also combined four of their super groups which brings up my biggest question. Why no Changmin? Changmin, or Max, of TVXQ is good at dancing. All of TVXQ is. The song Younique Unit sings is called Maxstep. All I can think of when I sing it to myself is, "Max Power!", a misquote of an Eat Your Kimchi video. Therefore, I am missing the Max of Maxstep.
As a music video, it was very SM Entertainment. They danced in several interestingly lit rooms, and soloed in various stationary sets. Interesting angles and good beat propelled a lot of the music video. As with any group that you know, you want to figure out which person dancing is which. Therefore, I was a little disappointed that the dancing shots were so far away. With most of the hair being black or dark and similarly styled, it was hard to figure out who was who. Fortunately, EXO members were dressed in shiny metallic fabric, as they have been thus far in their EXO music videos. Eunhyuk of Super Junior had a portion of hair dyed, so I could tell who he was, and Hyeyeon is a woman, so it was pretty obvious who she was. That left Henry, Taemin, and Kai to figure out. I'm still trying to get it.
Maxstep is an okay song, featuring dubstep and rap, with lots of the lyric "Max time", I mean "maxstep". As a concept, it is fun because it allows you to see people from different groups working together. As a reality though, it should also have put more of a spotlight on these particular members. Only Taemin is in a larger group than normal with everyone else coming from a group of 8 or more. Therefore, with decreased numbers, each one should have had more and better facetime, but that didn't happen. I think that may be the most disappointing thing about the music video. Opportunity knocked, but the door wasn't opened, at least not all the way.