Paradise by the Firelight

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.

------------------------------------------------

*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.)

Is Park Hyo Shin Gay? Now You've Got Me Wondering

In my first post for this blog, I explained why I wasn't enabling comments, and added: "Meanwhile, I'll try to answer any e-mail, though I also reserve the right to post anything I receive, especially if it's either very helpful or informative, or if it's abusive." Almost two years later, and this is the first time I've fulfilled that promise.

I got the following e-mail yesterday. What follows is the whole text, which (as you'll see) ends abruptly:

At this link: http://thisislikesogay.blogspot.com/2008/12/park-hyo-shin.html

you posted it, regarding Park Hyo Shin. Why are you accusing him of being gay ? What about his music is homosexual ?
I am writing as the designated person chosen by a Park Hyo Shin fan club, which has over 320 members.
Homosexuality is defined as:
ho·mo·sex·u·al·i·ty
(hō'mə-sěk'shōō-āl'ĭ-tē, -mō-)
n.

1. Sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.
2. Sexual activity with another of the same sex.


NOW, WHERE DO YOU ARRIVE AT HIM BEING HOMOSEXUAL ?
THIS WOULD BE THE SAME AS US SAYING, "THAT IS SO 'SOME IDIOT ON THE INTERNET STATING THAT PEOPLE ARE GAY WHEN THEY'RE NOT'", PERTAINING TO YOU.

SORRY, BUT YOU NEED TO BE CAREFUL WITH WHICH ENGLISH WORDS YOU USE. IN CASE YOU DON'T SPEAK ENGLISH, WHICH WE ARE ALL ASSUMING THAT YOU DON'T , OR AT LEAST YOU DON'T VERY WELL, THEN YOU NEED TO LOOK UP GAY IN THE DICTIONARY. ALSO, WE FEEL THAT WHAT YOU SAY AT THIS POINT IS TAINTED. SO WE ARE BLOCKING YOUR INCOMING MESSAGES.
YOU CAN SEND THEM, BUT THEY WON'T GO IN OUR INBOX, AND WILL DIRECTLY GO TO OUT DELETED FILE. BY THE WAY, PARK HYO SHIN HAS HAD SEVERAL STRAIGHT/HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS, AND MANY OF HIS SONGS ARE BASED ON A CERTAIN FEMALE W

I might have answered it in e-mail, but as you can see, my incoming messages are blocked. That would be easy enough to get around, but no need.

I've noticed, in looking at the online searches which lead some readers here, that some people are searching for "park hyo shin gay." From the message above it appears that some of Park's fans are self-appointed Image Cops, dedicated to preserving their idol's good name. Since Park's audience seems to be largely young women, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a good many boys, envious of his appeal, call him "gay." It helps their teen-macho posturing that Park is famous for weeping during his concerts. This has no bearing on his sexual orientation, of course.

But neither does his public persona. Entertainers are no different from the general population in this regard, and the few openly gay people in the industry are the tip of the iceberg. I seem to recall that the songs on George Michael's Faith were reported in the straight media to have been inspired by a woman with whom he'd had a painful affair. Videos like the one for "Father Figure" encouraged the impression. Michael didn't publicly acknowledge that he was gay until he was forced out of the closet by his arrest for a "lewd act" in 1998.

The Korean entertainment industry is even more reactionary than the American, and I do wonder idly from time to time which Korean stars are hiding same-sex desires and relationships behind straight façades. At this point it appears to be even more stressful for Korean entertainers to come out than it is for their Western counterparts, probably due in part to the lack of a gay movement and visible gay community in South Korea, so I'm not looking to see a lot of openly gay Korean celebs any time soon.

Whether Park Hyo Shin is gay or not, I have no idea, not even wishful thinking. Nor did I say anything about his sexuality in the post my critics mention. Children, how did you arrive at the conclusion that I did anything of the kind? I'm guessing that you saw it in a web search, read the name of the blog and the title of the post, and jumped to conclusions. So much for any notion that the young are more Internet-savvy. Next time, read for context, mmmkay?

The key thing is, it is not an accusation to say that someone is gay -- well, it is among overwrought homophobes, I admit, but I'm not one of their number. (I suspect the fans figured out that I'm gay -- hence the dark insinuation that "what [I] say at this point is tainted." Wrong, dears: your denunciation is tainted, though, with the lowest sort of bigotry.) And the trouble with antigay bigotry is that it makes it impossible to know for sure whether to believe someone's denials of submitting to homosexual advances. Maybe they're telling the truth, maybe they're just closeted. If Park Hyo Shin were a closeted gay man, though, his fan club would be the last to know.

Park Hyo Shin, Continued

I could have put this clip in my earlier post about Park Hyo Shin, but I hadn't watched it at the time, thinking it was the performance -- not one of his best, to my mind -- from his concert DVD. It's not; apparently it's from a TV appearance the beginning of his career.

One commenter here claims that Park was 17 in this clip. I can't find a date for it, but it's possible. (P.S. Or maybe not: According to Wikipedia he was born in 1981, and his first album was released in 2000, when he was 18 or 19. But he was still probably a teenager at the time of this performance.) If so, he's just that much more impressive. His English diction is rough (another commenter said when Park sings in English, he sounds like he has a mouthful of marbles), but that's more than made up for by the fluency and emotional intensity of the performance.

Park Hyo Shin

I haven't done a video introduction to a Korean pop musician in a while, and I still have a few who deserve your attention. This time it is Park Hyo Shin, whom a friend recommended to me a few years ago. I bought his fourth CD, Soul Tree, which at the time was his newest work. Much of it was pretty standard K-pop ballads, but a couple of tracks caught my attention, especially "Hey U Come On":



The distracting sax squeal (probably sampled) is mixed too prominently in this clip, but it's the best version I could find on YouTube; and aside from that cavil, it's a good performance. Park's voice reminds me of various American R&B singers I liked in the 80s, like Jeffrey Osborne or James Ingram.



Park has also performed with other singers, often from outside Korea:





And with other Korean singers. I'm trying to remember where I first heard this song, if it was on a compilation or on one of Park's albums:





The second, of course, is from Disney's Aladdin. (There seem to be a number of versions of this song by K-pop singers on YouTube.)

Park has also been doing some slightly different things, possibly trying to leave his teenybopper idol image behind. (He was only about 20 when he put out his first album, and I was surprised, when I first heard his singing, to learn how young he was.) This clip, for example, shows him improvising and scatting in a radio studio with a keyboard player and drummer, and then singing a trote, an older Korean pop form.



His voice is so distinctive that I doubt he will ever be able to broaden his range very far -- I suppose that's one reason, aside from Show Biz reasons, that he's doing all those duets and collaborations, to participate in some different sounds. I enjoy him enough, though, to want to keep track of his work. There's a lot of clips featuring him on YouTube (including a creepy news item from the time in 2007 he checked into a hospital suffering from stress), so look him up if you find these samples interesting.