Mental Illness Friday over on Poptimists: IU THE STORY ONLY I DIDN'T KNOW (나만 몰랐던 이야기)
"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.
To put this in context, here's John Conlee's "I Don't Remember Loving You":
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.]
Click to viewThe 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.
To put this in context, here's John Conlee's "I Don't Remember Loving You":
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.]