Trouble Maker Go Mobile (Gun Crazy In Korea 2)

[koganbot]

Real good overinterpretation of the new Trouble Maker video "There Is No Tomorrow (Now)," comment posted by YouTube commenter hyunseungtwin 8 minutes ago:

The music video follows the story of the musical "Bonnie and Clyde". They're a couple, both who are criminals. Both try to forget each other but they can't because they still love each other. They spend their last night together kissing, setting walls on fire, all of these a memory of the past they shared. Near the end, two cars circle around them they symbolize their death. The MV portrays a sad romance between a couple that has no other way to love, than death.

I myself had only gotten as far as "hangovers, binge drinking, mobile home, Union Jack what?, the spector of physical dissolution, out to the nowhere, let's see if we can break the record for how quickly we can get Korean TV to ban our video." But yeah, the Bonnie And Clyde/Gun Crazy thing: Gun Crazy was a Bonnie And Clyde progenitor directed by Joseph H. Lewis in 1950; clips from it were actually used by Hwang Soo Ah in her video for Infinite's "Be Mine." But arguably, even though it lacks guns and b&w noir evocation, the Trouble Maker video* comes closer than "Be Mine" to the actual feel of Gun Crazy, the cars circling at the end recalling the Gun Crazy scene where the two protagonists each get in a different car to drive in a different direction (they're marked by police bulletins as a couple, doomed if they stay together), but the cars circle in on each other because the two can't bring themselves to separate — which honestly the cars in the Trouble Maker vid wouldn't have evoked for me had not the commenter brought up Bonnie And Clyde. Unlike John Dall and Peggy Cummins, our couple HyunA and JS aren't driving the cars but are merely encircled by them, the cars symbolizing a trap, not a rejected escape. But the feeling is there, of motion unable to break free. The incongruous Disney candy colors of "There Is No Tomorrow" make the video all the more touching for seeming to run opposite to the pro forma dissolution that washed-out colors or b&w would have evoked — K-pop smiley brightness in a ride to disintegration.

Watch on YouTube

*Video is directed by Lee Gi-beak; haven't yet done a search, though Wikipedia also credits Lee with the video for Beast's "Caffeine."

Song is by Shinsadong Tiger, Rado, and LE, says Wikipedia.

Comments

[koganbot]

Here's the Rihanna vid, which vastly improves the mediocre "We Found Love" for me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg00YEETFzg

Yeah, I see similarities and lifts, the candy-colored shimmer of "There Is No Tomorrow"'s alcohol echoing the candy-colored pills in "We Found Love," a brief car scene in WFL possibly inspiring the extended circling-car motif in "No Tomorrow," flames in each vid, shots out in the fields. WFL is explicit that the relationship is doomed by its own dynamic, while "No Tomorrow" adds to this the idea of a world closing in on our couple (or is this me being overinfluenced by hyunseungtwin's blurb?).

That said, "There Is No Tomorrow" has a different feel, garish to WFL's gritty, and the sense that the characters are caught in their life and their roles, not just in their passion.

I don't see that lifting from Rihanna and from the West in general is in any way antithetical to K-pop, or that it means HyunA's not doing it her way. I guess one man's archetypal is another man's hackneyed, but doomed lovers on the lam seems like a fine theme to hang a video on; is a logical followup to the "Trouble Maker" vid, the spy-versus-spy intrigues of that one dooming the couple as much as rootlessness and alcohol doom the couple in "No Tomorrow." Trouble is the duo's theme, after all.

As music, "We Found Love" never took me beyond ho-hum. In principle I like that Rihanna decided to take her voice of burnt sorrow and apply it to bright and catchy tunes, rather than flogging her sorrow to eternity. But except for a few tracks (e.g. "S&M") the result just felt compromised. Whereas HyunA's vocals, simultaneously pugnacious and inviting, seem adaptable to pretty much anything. And she's always been willing to go in any direction one following upon the other; e.g., when Bubble Pop"'s happy hip-thrusting choreography got banned from TV, she followed with the haughty mob boss of "Just Follow" sitting in near stillness. Just seems to be what she does, having a gas trying this thing, then that, then a third.

(I was about to say that "There Is No Tomorrow" has nothing like the immediate catchiness of "Trouble Maker," but then I remembered that the latter took a month or so to reach me. Eventually I came to the same conclusion the Korean public had already come to, that it was going to be a classic; don't think "No Tomorrow" will get there, or will continually entrap me in its mood as 4minute's "Volume Up" does to this day. All but three of the tracks I've mentioned in this comment are by Shinsadong Tiger, by the way (the three exceptions being "We Found Love," "S&M," and "Just Follow").)