True Love Is Hard to Define, But It's Pretty Easy to See...
 | With their lovely So Too Very Much release in February, and their March activities in Japan, I wasn't expecting anything new from these guys for a while yet. I've been pleasantly surprised by their Korean return and the release in question is itself absolutely fantastic. And when I say fantastic, I mean FANTASTIC. This is easily going to stand up as one of the very best releases of the entire year, it's going into my history books as one of the most fabulous releases EVER. |
From the set aesthetics and the basic styling, it looks like Just Tell Me can't possibly be anything to terribly spectacular. MYNAME isn't really a band with a track record of deeply meaningful or profoundly impacting releases, so when combined with a concept that looks to be more of the same old, hiphop-grunge-but-still-clubbing-chic that's been flooding the market lately there was really no reason to suspect that this release would be incredible. Honestly, there were a dozen pressing reasons to think this release would be anything but awesome, including the fact that MYNAME has already had a comeback this year, and they've had activities in Japan, so theoretically they haven't had much time to spend on this; not to mention the fact that the concept seems blandly unoriginal and the the Choreo from the teasers has some moves that stand out as painfully frequent instances of recycling moves.
HOWEVER, to anyone who believed the teasers or who concluded on a cursory examination that it really is just another sex-focused grungy hiphop club thing: YOU GOT PLAYED. The whole thing is one big joke on us and the best part of it is that our expectations were used against us by preparing us for something mediocre, but what they gave us was something FABULOUS. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of people who are taking the release at face-value and as it's easily the best thing MYNAME has ever released, I will not suffer it to be maligned by people who won't give it more than a cursory look to allow the true elegance, sweetness, and complexity to unfold.
HOWEVER, to anyone who believed the teasers or who concluded on a cursory examination that it really is just another sex-focused grungy hiphop club thing: YOU GOT PLAYED. The whole thing is one big joke on us and the best part of it is that our expectations were used against us by preparing us for something mediocre, but what they gave us was something FABULOUS. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of people who are taking the release at face-value and as it's easily the best thing MYNAME has ever released, I will not suffer it to be maligned by people who won't give it more than a cursory look to allow the true elegance, sweetness, and complexity to unfold.
If the rhetoric above sound familiar, that's because it's incredible similar to something I said almost two full years ago, about a similarly maligned release. The last time I got this worked up about the awesomeness of Kpop it was due to the 2013 release of Teen Top's Rocking. That release was incredible, a complex display of careful consideration in pre-production that defied exception in the best ways. It can't hold a candle to how unbelievably wonderful Just Tell Me is, it's not even close.
| If you haven't seen MYNAME's epic release, watch it right now. Watch it and take in the seemingly stereotypical, overly sexualized, aggressive posturing, and other cliches blah blah blah. Then watch it again and notice how ridiculous the dance is; fun and funky fresh with a slide of absolute hilarity. Notice how, instead of the edgy rap track that the concept seems to promise isn't there, notice how instead the focus is on the smooth melodic turns. Notice how, considering the fact that the MV is full of sexy models and close contact, the Lyrics don't even contain a euphemism for sex... | |
 This picture isn't demonstrating a point, I just like ChaeJin's smirk. | Now honestly, the first time I watched this MV, even I didn't catch on to the fact that it was awesome. I got right away that it was catchy, like really catchy, but that's all I noticed the first time through. I started writing a review of it based on that first viewing and I got a few paragraphs in before I realized that I was definitely missing something. The track was startlingly catchy, not just the chorus, not just the bridge, not just a part ... nearly every time that a transition came up it flipped into a section that made my heart leap inside my chest with excitement. It was decidedly not a normal degree of catchy, even for a good song. There were too many different sections and all of them were dramatically engaging. Normally, that sort of thing leaves a track feeling cluttered, choppy, chaotic even. But not in this case. In this case, it's been carefully crafted into a masterpiece. |
The track starts off with a melodic vamp that was so catchy and energetic that, at first, I thought it was going to be used as the chorus (because plenty of other songs are structured to put the chorus right up front). I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was NOT the chorus (it wasn't even the only vamp), and that the real chorus was even catchier than the melodic vamp sections. The verses and the raps are catchy in their own way, punchy enough to delineate the chorus and the vamps so as to make them delighting occurrences when they pop up in the track. The fact that the Verse as a unit slowly slides from straight singing, to singing and rapping, to a singular burst of rap in the bridge that stands as a pseudo-verse makes it even more amazing by creating an observable, measurable point of evolution.
| Breaking it down by sections looks like this: A(PostVamp)-B(Verse)-C(PreVamp)-D(Chorus)-A2(PostVamp)-E(Verse2)-C2(PreVamp)-D2(Chorus)-F(DanceBreak/PseudoVerse)-D3(Chorus)-A3(PostVamp). Most songs even in Kpop rarely get to a section E... this track gets to section E in the first two minutes! The verses are structured so differently that they can't be counted as analogous sections, with the second verse containing a mini call-and-answer section that I was was tempted to call a mini-pre-bridge (but when put in context with the straight-rap pseudo-verse at the end of the bridge, I concluded that it was better to leave it). I was even tempted to break the chorus up into two sections, the begging half at the beginning and then the second half with two-lines of reasoning to explain the guy's confusion followed by a shorter burst of begging. Over all, the structure lets the track come full-circle but it's still a tricky setup. |  Again, this pic isn't here to prove a point. It's to break up a massive block of text and to appreciate the fact that GunWoo really likes that high note. |
It's an unusual, ambitious set up and it works out extraordinarily well here. For something like this to go over well, every section has to be very strong, fabulously catchy and independently awesome, and yet they also have to be 100% compatible and mesh together well with recognizable continuity. It's a very tricky thing to pull off and it's hard to be confident enough about getting it right to go through with producing a track like this. In this case, the simplicity and consistency of the backing track is what helps accomplish the task of blending the sections together: by keeping things the same and simple, a continuity is achieved, and having the backing track drop out, or be put through a filter, creates just enough distance to make the transitions feel smooth. Beyond the epic structuring, the song is mixed well, keeping all of the instrumental elements feeling open and airy as they're kept neatly in their isolated pockets while allowing the changes in the vocals (notably the dramatic swells of multiple voices joining in and the punch of all but one falling out) to shine in their own space and feel fully fleshed out among the backing.
 | After having watched the MV over and over and over in order to map out the track's structure, I began to notice a lot about the video that I'd missed the first time. On my first few run-throughs, all I really noticed was how over-used everything was. Some of the choreo moves, like the hand-wave-and-step thing, have been tragically common occurrences in recent releases and the styling was so straight-fowardly typical that I could recognize the brands of most of the clothing. It all looked gorgeous on the MYNAME members, and obviously, their strong personalities ensured that their unique charms shone through, but it was still very ordinary and stereo-typically in line with the concept. Hell, even the sets were recycled, that fake-elevator thing has been in at least a dozen MVs over the years and that's just that I can guestimate off the top of my head. Over all, it seemed very blah. But I had a niggling sense that I was missing something, something obvious, something big. |
| While I was drafting this as a review, I mentioned something along the lines of "the moves are so preposterously over-acted and ridiculous that it almost makes the cliches feel like satire, or at the very least comedic commentary". With that idea sifting around inside my head I went back to find specific moments I particularly enjoyed: moments like the hands-clasped-begging move and the limp-noodle-arm-squiggle-thing, and of course the talking-hand of the chorus... moments that upon review turned up at key moments in the song to match up with lyrics in a marvelously complementary manner. The begging occurred when the narrator was begging. The arm-squiggles came up when the narrator was under duress, frustrated to the point that made arm-flailing the only rational response. The talking-hand in the chorus existed among lines referencing the narrator's desperation for a conversation (right hand, not the left, signaling a trusted partner and no ulterior motives, btw, it's a fairly universal symbol: the King's right-hand, shaking hands, right hands never hold the knives at dinner...the right hand has a LONG history of being used to mean earnest honesty, openness, trust, and virtue). |  |
 | One of the major reasons that I was initially unenthusiastic about this MV is that there were SO MANY sexualized female-body-shots. In my first-draft, I mentioned that the sex-shots were "uncalled for" or, at the very least, there were a few too many of them to be excusable... In less than 4 minutes there I counted at least 28 separate shots where nothing but a girl's boobs or backside was in frame, and a dozen more where body-shots of the female arm-candy were main features in the frames supposedly focused on something else... compared to about 11 shots of the guys' bodies without their faces in-frame... yeah, just a bit excessive... and tinged with voyeuristic creepiness. |
And yet, after watching it repeatedly I found myself less bothered by the body-shots than I thought I would be. I could barely make it through JYP's Who's Your Mama and all the sexual imagery in Big Bang's Bae Bae makes my skin crawl. I wasn't expecting this to be all that different, even if I did manage to get used to all the sexy. But just getting used to, or simply putting up with something never really makes the edge of distaste go away. Something about what I was watching made the sexy-shots not bother me. It took me a while to figure it out: the shots aren't meant to be overtly voyeuristic, at least not in the traditional sense of seeing in on a private moment that you're not supposed to. The way these ones are being used is to define the fact that the sexiness is taking place inside a private moment that the viewer is intruding on. This one takes a bit of explaining, but trust me, it'll make sense.
| It starts with the fact that the thing I missed about the sexualized contact between the MYNAME members and the girls is how casual it is. The sexuality and sexual attraction that's shown here isn't the sort of hair-pulling, mark-leaving, forceful, powerful, sexual aggression shown in a lot of MVs with this sort of concept color-scheme... it's completely and utterly non-aggressive to the point of being aggression's perfect opposite: it's relaxed. Even this shot to the right... the initial shock value of it set me off, like ohmygod what is this rated sort of shock... But take a closer look. Both of their shoulders are sloped in a relaxed easy manner. And both of their heads are listing at an easy cant. When you're stressed, the muscles in your neck tighten, and you stare things down straight on. JunQ's arms are crossed, but they're loose and low, and just look at her hands they're loose and open, playing absently with his collar. That is NOT a stress reaction. |  |
Though it looks like the girls are being used as props and viewed simply as objects, the lyrics make it clear that the opposite is true. The guys are taking girl on a date and her reaction to his choices are completely incomprehensible to him. In almost the same way that the MYNAME members are all representative of a singular male narrator, the girls are representative of the narrator's singular female companion. For every scene where one of the boys is on their own, there's almost always two girls in the frame, one of which is looking towards him while the other is usually looking away (that's not a 100% consistent detail, but it happens often enough, at crucial enough points in the lyrics, to be significant). Even when there's only one girl who's acting super-sexually towards the narrator, she's holding him at a distance or looking somewhere else. These sets contradicting actions/reactions are representative of how the narrator is struggling to rationalize his companion's reactions. More than wanting the girl sexually, the narrator wants to understand her thoughts and feelings, and while he is definitely frustrated by his inability to just know but he's not angered by it, his frustration manifests in playful displays of utter idiocy rather than the violence shown in a lot of other versions of this sort of scenario.
 | In other versions, when the girl won't speak her mind, the boy often grabs her wrist or pins her to a wall or forcibly holds her still and makes her look at him until she explains. In this case, the boy does nothing of that idiocy and instead proceeds to beg, while still respecting her boundaries. Assuming there's some lenience granted for light affectionate skinship between actively dating couples, he never once touches her out of turn and he never forces anything. Though he does touch her rather intimately, he never holds her down or holds her still and his hands on her body are always open and un-restricting. Even in the screencap on the left, his hand is flat and open enough for it to barely qualify as holding her; his fingers are curled just enough to help support her leg, and the lack of tension in his wrist (shown by the fact that his bracelet is hanging loosely in its place and not being pulled tightly against the pair) proves that he's not even close to hold her fast to him. His hand is simply there for support, because lifting a knee that high is hard enough in flats, but in those heels... eesh. His right leg is even slightly forward to let her rest the side of her heel on his knee, while simultaneously widening his base to provide a stable support. And just look at his and on her hair, his fingers aren't wound tightly around thick locks, he's not forcing her in place... he looks like he's affectionately petting a treasured household animal friend. |
My favorite part is that he displays his frustration with himself and with her by flapping around like a slapped mackerel. He even asks his mom for help with attempting to understand the woman who holds his heart and sincere affections. Never does he hold her forcibly, move to strike her, or even look at her with anything but utter enchantment and fascination. Not for one second does he look at her with anything but delight. He seems to be thoroughly thrilled with her very existence. He literally does back flips to impress her. He tries to soothe away her worries by asking if she's bored or nervous and implores her to have faith in him and be honest. Not only is the entire focus of the song fixated on the girl's thoughts and feelings, the only thing that the guy ever mentions wanting from her is to understand. Not even once is anything else mentioned. That physical intimacy is shared between the narrator and his love is implied by their casual sexy skinship, but the only thing the guy wants from her is for her to explain how he can make her happy. Even in the cutesy girly oh-sex-is-evil sort of story in Kpop, at least some mention of holding or touching or kissing is made. But in this song? Nope. Not one. You read correctly. NOT. ONE. Go check if you don't believe me. Seriously.
| Really, just look at this screencap on the right and tell me that it shows something other than a guy marveling at the miraculous existence that is his earthbound Angel. Honestly, this is one of the sweetest little love stories I've ever seen in Kpop, a HUGE surprise coming from a release set in this sort of aesthetic. The ONLY thing that the narrator wants is to understand the girl's feelings, and if that is not ushy-gushy shit to swoon for than I don't know what is. |  |
The other part that makes this video absolutely PERFECT is the fact that sexy-physicality and physical intimacy is represented as something that can be casual and comfortable. It's not the sexy scenarios that make the guy uncomfortable, it's not his 'animalistic' desire for more that get him frustrated with his companion's unresponsiveness, all the saturday night sexiness and close-contact is represented as nothing more important or uncontrollable or worthy of reverence or disdain than a weekend of lounging around in PJs.
 | Physical intimacy is being shown as an aspect of life that is acceptable and normal and THAT is how a healthy relationship should work. Both parties are distinctly aware that they have no right to hold the other down but they also have no reason not to hold each other close. Even here on the left, when the girl is literally on top of JunQ on the couch, there's more than enough room between them for him to escape if he decided that he wanted to. In fact, it's this image, with both partners looking straight at the camera, that is one of the best displays of the fact that the sexiness we see isn't for us, it's pat of a relaxed and private moment between lovers who are intimately comfortable with themselves and with each other. It's fantastic. |
| I had no reason to suspect that such a cute love story would be embedded in this sort of a genre and that is what really puts the icing on the cake for me. Not only is this a gorgeous and dark and sexy MV, not only is the song unbearably sweet and gooey and hella awesomely catchy, not only is it all fantastically well produced... the creators used the audience's expectations to give them exactly what they weren't prepared for. We got straight-up PLAYED. And the joke fell together perfectly. |  |
From a surface glance, a viewer would expect this to be an epic awesome rap track about unrequited love or desire, filled with dramatic and legitimately seriously story-arcs and overtures. What it turned out to be is an sickly-sweet story inside melody-focused pop song about a genuinely loving relationship with a video that somehow still magically meshes perfectly with everything else that's going on... the video's editing is flawless, presenting so many perfectly timed cuts and visual transitions that play perfectly into the lyrics and sit sweetly inside the track. It's really quite an incredible feat and it's easily the best release so far this season, and probably the best so far this year.
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