Speaking of Korea (and if you haven't heard, the ruling party blocked Yoon's impeachment), this video turned up on YouTube this week.
I'm fond of Park Hyo-shin's music, and I'm happy to see that he's still active - it was his name on the video that drew my attention. I should be ashamed that I didn't recognize Kim Tae-hyung's name. He is, of course, a member of the internationally popular K-pop group BTS, but I've never found them or their music interesting, and his name rang no bells for me. I'm gratified that Kim, also known as V, decided to record this duet with Park; it will boost Park's visibility both in Korea and around the world. (Reminds me of Elton John recording "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" with John Lennon.)
But what is going on here? Two music videos have been released to promote "Winter Ahead." The other one shows him in a theater, then blowing out birthday candles, and then in a European mansion nuzzling a sculpture of a naked woman which later comes to life, carrying a teddy bear through a European street, and back at the birthday party, dancing chaotically in a crowd of Westerners. It has little if anything to do with the sloppy English lyrics, whose refrain is "Lie with me" and "Paradise." I'm not sure who wrote "Winter Ahead"; the videos credit just about everybody except the songwriter. I'm going to suppose Kim wrote it.
But this video, the one I embedded here, shows Kim and Park sharing a Western style steak dinner by candlelight with plenty of wine, singing the song to each other. That wasn't clear to me at first, but this making-of video shows them rehearsing the lyrics for the shoot, deciding how to play it. I wondered as I watched it, more than once, if they understood what they were singing. Sure sure, this is homosocial male bonding, and Korean men can be very affectionate with each other, but "Lie with me" takes it further than that: the song is about erotic desire. There was a time when Koreans could pretend not to know that homosexuality exists in Korea, but the popularity of BL* graphic novels in Korea, as in the rest of Asia, should have changed that. I think the generational change is apparent in the making-of video: Kim and Park hug each other in greeting early on, but Kim (28 years old) is visibly more relaxed about it than Park (43). Koreans traditionally aren't big huggers, but evidently it's caught on among the young, like so many Western customs.
I'm not suggesting that Kim and Park are gay, or boyfriends. (Years ago I enraged some Park fans who thought I'd said he was gay. Not this time either, kids.) Yes, it's a video, but what is it meant to depict? Just in Korea times have changed, and with BTS' international reach they aren't even trying to be "pure" Korean, whatever that would be. No matter what Kim and Park and their collaborators on the video had in mind, people outside Korea (and probably inside too) are going to see two cute guys singing "Lie with me" to each other, with the indication that it will be Paradise, and they'll read it as a love song. Surely someone on the creative team would have noticed it. I wonder how many BTS fans also love BL media? I'll bet a good many of them. They won't consider it an accusation to see this video as a date between two male stars, they'll see it as a celebration. That's part of the cultural world BTS operates in, and they must know it.
But then the other video, the Pygmalion one, depicts Kim as a heterosexual. That's as much a performance as this video, but how many apologists are going to insist that Taehyung isn't really straight, he's just acting?** Anyway, my main question here is what Park and Kim are performing in the intimate dinner video. It seems obvious to me, but maybe I'm misreading it.
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*BL = Boy Love, but most of the manga and dramas I've seen involve sexual relationships between high school boys, college students or even older men, into their thirties.
** As I once wrote about Shakespeare's sonnets, some of which are addressed to a young man and some to a woman:
No one seems to suppose that in the "Dark Lady" sonnets, Shakespeare was merely indulging in conventional rhetoric about a heterosexual passion that he didn't really feel. No, those poems are assumed to be transparently autobiographical, referring to a genital relationship replete with exchanged bodily fluids. It is the "Fair Youth" sonnets that are assumed to be "innocent", obviously intended to express no erotic feeling whatever -- unless they are appropriated for heterosexual use, in which case they are obviously erotic. (No one seems to have got in a snit over the [hetero]sexualizing of the "Fair Youth" sonnets in the movie Shakespeare in Love.)
