Feb. 18th, 2011

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"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":



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.

ExpandYou must look like someone I once knew )

As usual, I'm cross-posting this over on Poptimists.

[UPDATE:As Mat informs me over on the "Plastic Face" thread, many LOEN Entertainment and Nega Network videos, including this one, are directed by Hwang Su-a (황수아; which also gets transliterated Hwang Soo Ah); she also did "Good Day" and "You And I" and Infinite's "Before The Dawn" and "Be Mine" and Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra" and Ga-In's "Irreversible," among others. An impressive track record.]
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Always thought "Under Pressure" was a stone cold bore, but then I don't think I heard it until after I'd heard "Ice Ice Baby," which I love (or strongly like). I think it helped that I originally heard "Ice Ice Baby" when it was first appearing in hip-hop strongholds (major urban markets) but before it hit nationally or the video showed up. So I was hearing this utterly ominous bassline across the chill San Francisco night, and an uninflected voice going "Ice ice baby" in a cold synthesized whisper. It didn't feel cute or energized or pop at all, and was better for this. I paired it in my mind with another Bay Area hit that summer, Paris's "Break The Grip Of Shame," with similar menace from the bass and the barren delivery, the same dark atmosphere. Interestingly, "Break The Grip Of Shame" is a "conscious" black militant rap, a fact I noticed but that wasn't key one way or another to why I liked "Shame" (and I didn't for several umpteen listens even know that Vanilla Ice was white, though I suppose I should have figured it out from his name).



ExpandI'm guessing that Ice Ice Baby entered my life in a sonically different manner from how it entered most of yours )

(I posted this the other day over on Popular, along with some vintage appraisals by Greil Marcus, Chuck Eddy, and others of "Ice Ice Baby" and "Pop Goes The Weasel.")

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Frank Kogan

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