Monday, April 03, 2006

New Hobby - Being depressed by Korean music videos of lovesick robots

So Jessie has a new hobby, and it's catching on with me.
You see, you can only watch McGyver over and over again so many times before your girlfriend starts to feel threatened. So now we watch more MTV, which before we would just skip over.
Here's the formula for a music video as Jessie has determined it (probably to be edited later once Jessie corrects me):

Two people who could not possibly be more in love + shots of frolicking + boyfriend is a photographer (my addition) + tragic death of one lover by train collision and/or falling from a great height = top ten hit
(edit after talking to Jessie = sometimes they drown too)

Once they have established that the two people are in love, one will be inevitably killed off.

There have been two noteable exceptions:


  1. Two young dogs are in love. One dog goes away, or is taken away. The second dog spends the length of the video in search of his lost love/friend. It's hilarious. The artist clearly understands how ridiculous the formula is and is making fun of it. The search is complete with the same emotional sidelong glances at the camera and soft focus running that makes the human videos so tragic.
  2. There are two young girls who are clearly more than friends. They spend the whole video getting closer and closer to kissing, with creative camera angles that make their lips seem as though they are almost teaching even though they are inches apart. Then, in the end, in front of a blazing sun, they kiss, but their mouths are obscured, of course. I was pretty shocked, because all you hear is "Koreans are so conservative, Koreans aren't tolerant of homosexuality". But clearly things have changed and/or are changing, maybe foreign opinions are the ones that are lagging.

The kicker was a video that was on as Jessie was leaving this morning. It begins with a girl apparently being shot, or hit by lightning, judging by the flashing and the electrical, still shocking wound on her stomach. Next scene, the girl is in a trach can, made up like a goth Candy Striper. A new guy finds her, and this is where you realize that she is a robot. He repairs her, and teaches her how to love again using books all in english. So, I'm not sure how he read them to her if he went through the public school system.
In the end, he bores of her, and begins to date other girls. Of course, this breaks her heart-shaped circuits, and she can't figure out an algorithm to deal with her pain. So she shoots him. That's harsh.
But wait! The Zack Morris remote comes out and they rewind to a time before the hurting. And he takes her out, and places her right back in the trash can. That's harsher.

It would be a cool video, if not for the fact that every music video has the exact same plot, and they all are so damned sad! Has there never been a happy Korean relationship?! This country needs some "Preppy Rock", stat. Also, they need to play "Peaches" by The Presidents of the United States of America after every third video.

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