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| Off-duty model Kang Yu-rim (@about_ego) sports the hypermodern, ready-for-the-world techwear look that is even showing up in BLACKPINK videos. In a few months, you will see a watered down version of this on the streets of Seoul. |
By Michael Hurt
Welcome to the Rhizome
As a visual sociologist, I started this article a long time ago by talking about the fantasy worlds of BTS. But in the time that has passed since this video was released, BTS has been upstaged in my mind by BLACKPINK, whose amazing, interstellar video brimming over with cosmic bling must now come first. The space in which BLACKPINK or BTS moves, from stage to stage, scene to scene―is a rhizomatic hyperspace―a hypertext version of the normal spaces in which music videos often place themselves. Basically, a rhizome is a complex system of nodes in a plant root network, in which one can plot a path non-linearly, punctuated by nodes from which you can go in any direction. Rhizospace uses the spatial logic of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure™ books of my youth, the links of the World Wide Web, Facebook, and all social media. It is also the digital-era, culturally hybridic, hypermodern style of the best K-pop music videos. It defines their style; it is the definitive marker of Korean style.
Put quite simply, this video is out of this world ― figuratively and literally. The members are on other planets, in other worlds. They are in their own cinematic universe . The video defines a timely departure from the dreary and depressing world of K-pop as lit by the immorality of the Burning Sun, in whose eerie light K-pop must be seriously reexamined because of the recent revelations of pornographic practices, prostitution, and other forms of insidious, moral perniciousness.
In what just might be the first K-pop video of the post-#metoo/Burning Sun Age of Revelations, the video is noticeably devoid of the standard oversexualizing genre conventions of K-pop music videos involving writhing, lithe young women. Devoid of distracting butt, breast, or lascivious lip-licking shots, the video is a tour de force of fantasy depictions of super female Ubermenschen. But girls this time. Holy. Godlike.
The video begins with silver brass actually heralding their imminent arrival in a Cathedral of Holy Bling. Then they appear as Ameterasu-like sun goddesses who figuratively hold human hearts in their hands as clutch purse accessories. And then they literally kick in the door in a visual assault of colorful kitsch as powered by the same kind of studios now popular with Korean Instagram influencer-models that serve up American-style cereal boxes and shopping carts-as Pop Art that would make Andy Warhol or Ray Liechtenstein squeal in delight.
After the head nod to Korean Instagram and another appearance of the sun goddess, we are presented with a remix of the cinematic cliche of the girl revving her American power car and running down her weaker self in a Tarantino-in-Deathproof effort to kill the kind of cliched love that is the topic of the song. And that is before even getting to the standard K-pop-perfected display of kinaesthetic hypnosis that comes with the synchronized dance in the trendy techwear that the cool kids at Seoul Fashion Week are wearing right now.
And by the end of the video, we have BLACKPINK members shooting arrows at themselves, and dancing within the giant, metal maw of a fantastically gargantuan bear trap. Wow.
And now, we can talk about BTS, since they exist in rhizospace, too.
Watch this video. They are not on Earth. They are not in space. They are in a different fantastic universe.
A rhizomatic visual logic here jumps around from one logical point to another, like hyperlinks on the web, to which we have become quite accustomed. The better K-pop music videos, like the K-fashion that parallels (and helps define) its style, move rhizomatically. This is one of K-pop videos' trademark moves, besides the extreme precision of the choreography, which the "Kill This Love" video only got to as a perfunctory afterthought to remind people that this is, after all, a K-pop video.
But to get truly what is going on in K-pop videos, take a standard, semiotically conservative, American music video that functions in the realm of the fantastic, as in say Nikki Minaj's (sexual) fantasy of "Anaconda."
Normal, basic space
By comparison, Anaconda is a fairly conservative text, actually. It is a Newtonian understanding of space and employs an antiquated semiotic/symbolic logic. It is quite linear and thematically narrow―sex, sex, sex. Beginning with the establishing metaphor of the "anaconda" (long, thick penis) that is introduced with the Sir-Mix-a-Lot sample from "Baby Got Back", from which Minaj's video directly riffs, the logical mise en scene is that of the jungle, where the anaconda lives. And from there, the extension of that placement in video space moves on to include pineapples, coconuts, and, of course, bananas.
Of course, there are jumps into fantastically empty, symbolic spaces such as a lap dance chair or a completely empty, white fantasy space in which to highlight lascivious dance moves, but most of the video's spatial imagining is squarely in the realm of the narrowly interpreted, organizing metaphor of the jungle, with expected references to wildness, sexuality, sweating, and brazen sexuality. While the hypersexual representations on screen are indeed socially provocative, the video itself is quite semiotically conservative, nearly staid and artistically safe in its basicness.
By contrast, V-pop, which is the Vietnamese re-channeling/re-interpretation of the unmistakable K-pop aesthetic of rhizospace, which also has planted its flag in this fantastic, random-access, visual world, demonstrates the Koreanness of the virtual space it creates. It utilizes a Korean style. It is what makes K-pop semiotically enticing and powerful, because it raises itself to the level of digital-era, hypermodern art, quite apart from any culturally specific content.
This is why BLACKPINK and its production team are breaking YouTube, kicking down doors, and why all the bases are in danger of belonging to K-pop. Say what you want about K-pop's lack of virtuosity, its over-production, or its saccharine sensibilities. That is the point: K-pop has mastered the art of artifice, and its innovative use of spatiality is just one of its stylistic markers.
For the record, I am not really a K-pop fan. I'm too old, American, and curmudgeonly. In 2013, I defiantly declared that "There Is No Korean Wave" in this very newspaper. I was wrong. It was my clickbaity way of saying that Korean popular culture products had matured and would be a permanent fixture of global media culture so there is no need to call it a temporary "wave." But my opinion was nevertheless still too full of the dismissiveness that was easy to have in a time when Korean domestic media was exaggerating K-pop's influence, Korean promoters were inflating ticket sales, and PSY was the only thing to point at.
But now, the global attention is there, the numbers are there, and it does not matter what I think. In the hypermodern media world of presidential Twitter feuds, the copy of the copy is the original, your avatar is actually you, and the hype is real. And no matter what old-fashioned ideas you have about virtuosity, originality, and the location of "talent" in an unapologetically mechanized, "soulless" mode of artistic production, BLACKPINK is the harbinger of the hypermodern future of musical and visual art.
Dr. Michael W. Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He researches youth, subcultures and street fashion as a research professor at the University of Seoul and also writes on visual sociology and cultural studies at his blog and book development site Deconstructing Korea. His PR/image curation company Iconology Korea also engages in an effort to positively shape images of social others in Korea, construct a positive face for Korea-based or Korea-interested clients, and positive images of Korea in the world. (Instagram @IconologyKorea)
