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koganbotThe music video proper for 2NE1's "I Am The Best" is out now.
Features medieval armor, large poodles, small kittens, restraints, studs, chainmail, suit jackets, vinyl blouses, funny hats, pyramids, trains, and gongs. The music is the little drummer boy sent through Marine training and given a tommy gun. Except it's also beautiful blobs of harmony and girl group dreaminess, as if the prettiness and the fierceness were one and the same. It's pretty fierce!
And it's the exact sort of thing that Korea is doing with American-based music that nonetheless has no equivalent in North America: aggression and beauty yoked together, hard rap coming on like it's the main meal and the melody but a condiment. A lot of fun. See them pushing the boys away in the "comeback" routine they did yesterday on TV:
They were just as tough in last year's even better "Try To Follow Me."
On this stuff 2NE1 have a hard-girl, take-no-shit-from-the-boys-or-anyone-else demeanor; but Park Bom, the melodic singer in the Misfits mesh, is just as capable of putting out deliriously sentimental sap, for instance, the recent "Don't Cry." And to contrast with that, she was introduced to the world back in 2006 when still a YG Entertainment "trainee," prior to being placed in 2NE1, as the juvenile delinquent shoplifter girl in Lee Hyori's "Anystar," an epic music video/mobile-phone commercial (literally, it was financed by Samsung).
Dara, the singer with the long face in the Lamborghini (or whatever it is), did "Kiss," a nice boy-girl stalk-and-withdraw flirtation video track, a couple of years ago.
Korea's dance-r&b combination seems way more assured and potent than the equivalent in Euro-America, though I guess it's all a big work in progress these days.
(We've been discussing "I Am The Best" and the new SNSD album back on a previous thread.)
Features medieval armor, large poodles, small kittens, restraints, studs, chainmail, suit jackets, vinyl blouses, funny hats, pyramids, trains, and gongs. The music is the little drummer boy sent through Marine training and given a tommy gun. Except it's also beautiful blobs of harmony and girl group dreaminess, as if the prettiness and the fierceness were one and the same. It's pretty fierce!
And it's the exact sort of thing that Korea is doing with American-based music that nonetheless has no equivalent in North America: aggression and beauty yoked together, hard rap coming on like it's the main meal and the melody but a condiment. A lot of fun. See them pushing the boys away in the "comeback" routine they did yesterday on TV:
They were just as tough in last year's even better "Try To Follow Me."
On this stuff 2NE1 have a hard-girl, take-no-shit-from-the-boys-or-anyone-else demeanor; but Park Bom, the melodic singer in the Misfits mesh, is just as capable of putting out deliriously sentimental sap, for instance, the recent "Don't Cry." And to contrast with that, she was introduced to the world back in 2006 when still a YG Entertainment "trainee," prior to being placed in 2NE1, as the juvenile delinquent shoplifter girl in Lee Hyori's "Anystar," an epic music video/mobile-phone commercial (literally, it was financed by Samsung).
Dara, the singer with the long face in the Lamborghini (or whatever it is), did "Kiss," a nice boy-girl stalk-and-withdraw flirtation video track, a couple of years ago.
Korea's dance-r&b combination seems way more assured and potent than the equivalent in Euro-America, though I guess it's all a big work in progress these days.
(We've been discussing "I Am The Best" and the new SNSD album back on a previous thread.)
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-28 10:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 04:53 am (UTC)Read the first two books in the Lymond Chronicles back in '99 (while procrastinating on my review of Sophie B. Hawkins; I wonder if there's a connection, and if they influenced how the review turned out; was the only review from that year that I considered good enough for Real Punks). Want to read more of them, so I've been afraid to look at your Dunnett posts for fear of spoilers.
Are they considered women's books? Seems that Francis, due to his role and his particular type of calculating smarts, is doomed to a significant amount of emotional isolation. So he's a romantic hero who can never receive love - not because he's cold, but because his mind has to perpetually be at work elsewhere.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 08:20 pm (UTC)No spoilers, but I was struck by the fact that the series as a whole splits its focus 50/50 between streams of gendered concerns, as it were, running in parallel - here are the things women do, and have done to them; here are the things men do, and have done to them. Lymond, who has an ambiguous sexuality and whose deepest sympathies lie with women, is made subject to successes and failures on both sides of the fence. The issue of his emotional isolation becomes the central Gordian knot of the story, to the irritation of some readers who feel he warps the cast around him enough as it is. :P
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Date: 2011-06-29 07:11 am (UTC)http://www.centroculturalcoreano.com/welcome.do
Last month, in Madrid, they opened a Korean cultural centre. K-Pop was used to make it fashionable, and no problem with that, soft power strategies, brand nationalism or whatever you want to call it, everybody is doing it to attract business to their own countries. But on the website there is a History section, very small, nothing worthwhile or that you are even going to try to read, but after the colonial rule and the Korean War, suddenly the country becomes a democracy and everything is good and great. So I wouldn’t have a problem if it was just this T-ara MV, but every time they do the nostalgia thing is always something like this. Nothing happened in the past, except the interesting bits (the History section does have a Dokdo island section, but right now is empty).
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 08:16 am (UTC)Anyway, the video is a lot of fun. Jiyeon, the one who hogs the spotlight, is all swagger, and a few of the members are capable actresses.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-29 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 04:18 am (UTC)I don’t understand the gesture of making a 12 minute MV. The song is much more enjoyable on the stage version or in whatever music show presentation. But the MV “needs” to even break the song (allegedly its raison d’etre) to keep telling us something. I don’t think it is something contingent as in “I didn’t engage with the MV’s story so I can’t understand the appeal of it”, is just, I don’t know, to link with 2NE1 above, is this kind of expectation as if they were making some kind of massive artistic achievement that you find surrounding this type of releases, this sort of grandiloquence. The part that I understand is how this kind of events can multiply their fans affections: these are their personal traits, only they can pull something like this (this worlview), this is their magic at work, etc. And then there is the surrounding discourse about each release, if you want, the spectacular side of it, but I don’t mean it as “fake”, the need to push things forward (releasing three MVs at the same time, expending so much money in this or that, having problems with TV shows to get a 15-minute comeback stage).
OK, there is this concept, transmedia storytelling, from Wikipedia: “Transmedia storytelling is a technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats, recognized for its use by mass media to develop media franchises”. So you would or could say that this need to push things forward, or being relevant, or ruling over the charts thank to their music is a story developed through different media (CDs, MP3s, mobile downloads, MVs, music shows, advertising, YouTube channels, promotional texts and pictures, radio, blogs, livejournal communities, etc.) and you would be right. But to take T-ara as example, they are going to open their own café franchise. How does that mix with the other story? I don’t think is something silly. If is not something artistic on their intentions, it just becomes a business thing or consumption about consumption. My problem is not so much that it can become this (so what?), a sort of business realism (there were choices to make money from this brand, so we used them), but the sort of reaction, call it whatever you want to call it “the grand narrative”, artistic response, this discourse that tries to humanize or to put into an accepted mold these actions (as in there is a strong musical project and then minor business incoherencies). I don’t know it this explains anything, but the connection with my reply before is that the soft power strategy, using culture to garner attention for your industrial output or to get inside a foreign market, makes culture become a stereotype* and this sort of grandiloquence, as I called it before, is a response, some would say great, I don’t see anything of interest in it, to put the “human” back in it.
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Date: 2011-07-11 01:31 pm (UTC)[OK, so I just now did look at "Man Down." Was glad that Rihanna played herself as an everygirl rather than a tough girl, and I like the way the video juxtaposes a before and after, Rihanna bright and light on her feet, dancing by the clothesline and on the beach and in the club, then Rihanna hurt and hiding; remorse and revenge. But the video feels slapdash and not thought-through. It's the same juxtapositions over and over, leading to about thirty seconds worth of plot.]
I can think of a lot of things in the music business to object to, from attempts at oligopoly control to exploitation of performers, but creating characters and events hardly seems a flaw, at least not an inherent flaw.
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Date: 2011-07-11 10:28 pm (UTC)Another thing is how people grasp them through the prism of how the Hallyu Wave presents itself or would like to think really is. Let’s see, for example, chapter 9 on this book (you can almost read all of it here):
http://books.google.es/books?id=edH5Aeb-epgC&printsec=frontcover
Again, I’m not saying that this is just a Korean thing and that they are “bad” or something. Spain has been trying for years to compliment their image of a tourism place with a cooking paradise culture and the rest. China has been for over a decade building the “China model” or “China Inc” image. Japan has been for years following the idea of “Cool Japan” where revenue is generated through their cultural industries like manga or anime. But to use this as example, Akihabara, a district in Tokyo, has been the “place” for consumers of those products (otakus) for decades before that idea of “Cool Japan” was implemented, so diverse government policies decided to make the place a tourism destination. So they started to rebuild the place and changing their ways, until there was a public demonstration from local owners and residents against them, and basically they went to other places. And then you have that in 2007, statistics suggest that Akihabara is the fifteenth most recommended place in Japan, but the eight most disappointing for visitors.
This is Lee Soo Man “selling” SM Entertainment’s three stages of globalization:
http://www.news.kpopweb.net/2011/06/news-lee-soo-man-outlines-sm.html?
This is a marketing discourse: this line of production is more profitable to your interests because… demonstrated by the following results… But even if the translation is crap, and I think the original text is on All K-Pop, so almost probed, note that in no place they mentioned any of the things I found positive about the South Korean Pop industry. What they are selling is the factory line and the business expansions to other markets: he mentions BoA and TVXQ success in Japan, and he could now also mention SNSD, but nowhere is mentioned that those artists have a different recording career on those countries. So what he is trying to sell is brands without specific, local contents, just content containers. In a South Korean tourism promotion CM years ago, the country presented itself as a place of technology, good life, traditional culture and… boybands. And I don’t think is just an occurrence of mine (K-Pop without K-Pop):
http://www.koreaherald.com/entertainment/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20110622000871
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Date: 2011-07-11 10:29 pm (UTC)Sorry if I’m boring about discourses and other post-modern things, I also thought it was all bullshit a year ago, before I saw how a made-up story (fake, but with a causal line so powerful that still is doing the rounds even if denied by management) on a forum about a girl on Momoiro Clover being anorexic made level-headed people with lots of experience went mad in moments. So I thought that I was undervaluing the power the stories people tell themselves about them, their choices, beliefs, options. So this is the difficult part to explain, my problem is not that this idea of globalization comes with a “watered down” nationalism, but that it needs a watered down nationalism, which is to put a story about “us” in it to make it acceptable.
“The true autobiography of Bob Dylan isn’t an account of his life, or how he got to be that way, but of how it got to be that way, how we got to be that way –it would be the autobiography of language/music, not of a person; it would be the account of the everyday life of the rock audience, and of how self-destruction came to be the truest noise on the radio and came to be marketed as such”
And leaving aside that probably is the worst use or understanding of a quote ever, is not that 2NE1 are girls that act in contradictory ways (being super-harsh on scene, then telling how hard their life was to became the stars they are now in long chapters in magazines, or going to “conquer” Japan and make the country fall in love with them, then happening one of the worst earthquakes on that country, them leaving as soon as possible, and while everybody is still in shock on that country, they talking about the sense of danger and the risk they suffered when they were on the floor 36 of their hotel (that is, a luxury place)) because they are products of this place, these circumstances, these troubles, this society, etc. and somehow the way they act, how they style themselves against the world, make them worthwhile, an example their fans can use to change their own lives or act against the same shared circumstances.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-11 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 04:20 am (UTC)Maybe after all, is that the if the (local) conditions that make K-Pop competitive and exciting in terms of style and music confection, could be replicated in foreign markets or if they would be streamlined to the current ways of each market (say Japan, say USA, etc.) and if this “discourse” that it seems I’m so interested in (calling “Korean” a global product that adapts itself to each nation’s consumer habits and customs or maybe is not that), is of any use (as reaction, not as excuse) in those circumstances or if it would get only worse.
More commentary
Date: 2011-06-29 03:03 pm (UTC)Re: More commentary
Date: 2011-06-30 07:35 pm (UTC)I wonder if anyone's compiled a list of the provenance of those clothes/shoes/accessories? The Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit currently at the MMFA features exhaustive annotations re: who's worn what on which tour and in what video. One looks at Madonna's bustiers the way one looks at Napoleon's gloves and boots, across the street in the next building - gauging the physical size of the person who fit inside them, measuring that against their influence on the world.
And Maddie responds (regarding the term "imperial phase") here.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-30 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-01 05:31 am (UTC)(There's an English version of the search enginge but it's difficult to use because songs and stage names are often listed by their romanized Korean titles. With 2NE1 it's best to fill in their names and then the time period you want results from here http://komca.or.kr/eng/eng_wos/wos_contents_01_sch03.jsp)
no subject
Date: 2011-07-01 05:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-04 09:38 am (UTC)Strange that the Korea Copyright Association spells him "Te Di." Maybe they're using translation software too.