A kung fu fighter in a disco

"Today my body is acting strange, as if it doesn't belong to me." Returning to the locked ward, we present IU's new video, "The Story Only I Didn't Know":



(If you don't see English subtitles, click through to YouTube and then on the lower right click CC.)

The major aesthetic question is can even a singer as sensitive as IU get me to like ballads, the answer here being, "Well, she did this time, but she doesn't always."

The lyrics are basically, You were leaving for good, you never actually felt love, but I was the last to know. Or as the Zombies might have said, Well, no one told me about him, the way he lied. The video, however, surrounds the track in a whole psych-ward story, bathed in numbed-out, walking-dead white. So the shattering of what was probably a brief affair is a mental shattering as well, love leading to pathology, or love itself a form of insanity - 'cept just because they're in an asylum doesn't mean the video is presenting this extreme breakdown as anything but the way things are, a hyperbolic expression of how it feels, and no sense that love shouldn't be this devastating thing, or that maybe such devastation isn't love.

Dialogue at the end:

"Your father passed away, right?" "He will come back. Everyone thinks he is my dad. But that person... is not my dad," leading some YouTube commenters to think the video's adding an incest and abuse theme, or a stepdad theme, or both. But a simpler interpretation would just be that the doctor is trying to link up the young woman's trauma with the recent loss of her dad, whereas the woman's got a different man on her mind, loss piling upon loss.

Conveniently, today in America this vid is introduced by an ad for Source Code, a flick about a military man whose mind crosses over into another man's body.

Beautiful song.

( You must look like someone I once knew )

At Maddie's suggestion, I'm posting Co-Ed School's "삐리뽐 빼리뽐 (Bbiribbom Bbaeribom)" as this week's problematic Korean video.



This presents the mentally ill as goofy and silly in kiddie-candy colors, so as potential objects of ridicule, I guess, though also as fun. So the positive side would be that, in playing crazy, the Co-Ed Schoolers get to be way goofy and silly and colorful and fun. My question here - and I don't know the answer - is: does stuff like this actually harm anyone? That is, does it help perpetuate attitudes that lead to bullying, to cuts in services, and so forth? I think that most people know that mental illness is actually sad, grim, dangerous. For example, one of my best friends in high school became a paranoid schizophrenic in his early twenties and several years later committed suicide. But that doesn't necessarily make me get all upset at a video in which stereotypically catatonic, obsessive inmates get to dance in bright colors. This video doesn't do right by his agony, but so what?

(And anyway, whether or not I get upset doesn't answer the question of whether anyone gets harmed.)

Think the song is a good one and I like the beat, though the singers are weak; typical anonymous Italodisco singers from 1985 could have given this more feeling. Fun is getting in the way of feeling, here. So this rendition is unfair to fun.

Co-Ed School's "Too Late" is a more gripping track and video, though again the singers don't give it what it needs.

This week we present a trio of leggy model types in their late teens/early twenties dressing like kiddie toys in a kiddie picture book. It looks incongruous and eerie to me. As Mat says, "It's odd, because they almost have a supermodel look to them with their long legs, and it just seems grotesque to put them in cheap girly Halloween costumes." I think you get a lot of this in Korea; I don't have any insights. Orange Caramel are a sub-unit of the fierce After School, so perhaps this is a chance at another identity (or maybe it's a way to wall off this side of their characters so the rest of After School - mostly mid to late twenties, and supposedly inspired by the Pussycat Dolls' eroticism, though I don't necessarily see that - aren't contaminated by the little-doll stuff).

Orange Caramel "아잉♡"


For further reading, see petronia on twee versus burikko.

(Orange Caramel also do a nice version of M2M's "The Day You Went Away," which it turns out has been covered a whole shitload of times in Asia.)

EDIT: Of course, just because something might strike us (in our ignorance) as grotesque doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it, or anything problematic. Or the problem might only be ours, that we don't understand what's going on. But women acting girlie can raise a red flag. That is, do women in that world generally have a choice not to act girlie? What are the consequences for those who don't act girlie?

What's the general feeling in Freaky Trigger etc. circles about the Go! Team? I know little of their stuff and sense that they get an ambivalent reaction, but I actually like the little I've heard. An old track of theirs was used effectively in the U.S. this year in a television PSA (public service announcement):

Videos:

RESTRAINT
Sunny Sweeney

It's someone else's party and she'll cry if she wants to, but discreetly.



Or on Vimeo.

LESS RESTRAINT
Ga-in "Irreversible"

Regrets, she's had a few.



[EDIT: I've now found a version with English subtitles; if you're not getting them, click CC. RE-EDIT: But KBS Media made YouTube kill it, so I'm now back to the unsubtitled version.]