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.

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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.)

Absolut Buttcrack

One rainy night in 2000, I sat in a gay bar in Chicago having a glass of wine and watching music videos. It was a weeknight, so the Closet was busy but not packed: there were people sitting on either side of me at the bar.

Two videos stand out for me in memory of that night. One was of Taylor Dayne, a woman whose music I knew very slightly. It was a big production number, with Dayne slinking and lip-synching through a horde of dancing couples, and being the Politically Correct old prune that I am, I suddenly noticed that though the choreographer had paired males with females and a few females with females, there were no males paired with males. This, although in a cast full of dancer/model types, there must have been a few gay males, and although Dayne’s target audience was presumably not homophobic teenaged boys. I leaned slightly over and mentioned this to the young man sitting beside me. He said, “Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed, I just love Taylor so much!” I grunted, probably only inwardly, and took another sip of my wine.

Not too much later, another video started, Madonna’s “American Pie”, a song she’d recorded for the soundtrack of The Next Best Thing, her movie with Rupert Everett. I hadn’t yet tried to watch the movie, though I’d read reviews of it. The video, however, surprised and delighted me. Madonna, in a tank top and rather grotty jeans, with a prom queen’s tiara on her long thick hair, lipsyncs to the song while prancing about in front of a large American flag and showing off her buttcrack. But intercut with her antics are short film clips of anonymous Americans, also posed in front of the large American flags. They range from industrial- strength rednecks in denim and adipose tissue to black folks in front of a mausoleum in New Orleans to a large woman in a wheelchair to a drum corps to cheerleaders. Some appear individually, or in couples, or in families or other groups. They are filmed in color, but the often harsh lighting and the people’s looks call up memories of black and white photos by Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Larry Clark. Because my own background is rural, working-class Indiana, I recognized those people, and I felt an ache of love for them.

Good enough, but (again probably only inwardly) I sat straight up when two young women kissed each other onscreen: their style was punk/goth, with tattoos, black clothing, and chemical-looking dyed hair, blonde for the butch and reddish-brown for the femme. Having kissed, they smiled sweetly (and a bit slyly) out at the world. A few seconds later, two young men posed in front of a flag hung in front of a little country church also kissed, then smiled too, squinting under the lights as if they were the sun. These guys were very whitebread, with short neatly trimmed hair, though dressed in clothes that most resembled k.d. lang’s prairie look on the cover of Absolute Torch and Twang. Those clips left me feeling warm through the rest of Madonna’s parodic patriotism. I’m not exactly a fan of La Ciccone, but I do appreciate that she knows she lives in an America that includes gay people.

Later I found that the DVD of The Next Best Thing included the “American Pie” music video, but didn’t buy it until I found a bargain-bin copy several years later. I got it out tonight, as I do from time to time, to watch the video again. Partly because I never get tired of watching it, and partly to check something a gay boy had once claimed online: “I could have sworn that Midge changed the lyrics of American Pie from ‘With a pink carnation and a pickup truck’ to ‘With a green carnation…’ I really don’t know if she’d go as far as to make that change to the song. (Hist. Note: Green carnations were used to signal who was gay in 19^th C. London)” (Hist. Note: Green carnations were a fad among “aesthetics” like Oscar Wilde in nineteenth century London, not all of whom were gay. Though if you wore your green carnation on the left side...)

I played that part of the video several times, and couldn’t tell if “Midge” did indeed change the lyrics: it sounded as if she were singing “pring carnation,” so perhaps she fudged it. Leaving aside the humor of the notion that Madonna would respect the artistic integrity of a True Classic like “American Pie”, what haunted me was that someone would get so excited about what might have been a hint in a song lyric attached to a movie where male homosexuality is overt and explicit as a plot and character element. (For those lucky enough to be ignorant, the premise is that Rupert Everett, as a gay gardener, and Madonna, his straight best friend, get so drunk one night that they don’t know what they’re doing, and end up having a baby together. They go on to form relationships with other people, and we see Everett with at least one boyfriend – this I’ve gleaned by fast-forwarding through the DVD.) Even younger gay men, it seems, are still living in the 1950s, where pinky rings, yellow ties, and other in-group signals were common among homosexuals; they’re so firmly embedded in that mindset that a possibly dropped hairpin on the soundtrack of a dreadful movie is more significant than an openly gay lead character in a dreadful movie. I have the impression that most gay boys to this day would rather worship straight divas (Leave Britney Alone!), identifying with them as they sing love songs to men, than hear a man sing a love song to a man.

Not that I’m one to talk, I who got teary-eyed because a diva included some queer kisses in her music video. But I’d rather see two boys or two girls kiss, or (better) hear a man sing a love song to a man, than watch a female female-impersonator like Taylor Dayne who doesn’t live in a musical world with gay people in it.

P.S. December 29, 2007: I embedded the "American Pie" video from YouTube. I've also tried to track down the Taylor Dayne video I saw (and dissed) in The Closet that night, but couldn't find it. The closest I could find was much smaller scale: TD and two male model/dancers. Maybe my fading memory just inflated them into a crowd? I don't think so, but I don't know which song or which video it was.