“Ayyy Girl” now has a VIDEO! The Kanye West laced song by JYJ from their “The Beginning” album is certainly growing on me. The video hit like a bolt of lightning (pun intended) online and my twitter lit up with people posting links to it. I give it a look, and as soon as I got over how sexy “little SuSu” (Junsu) is in the video, I began to see something deeper.
However, it has come to my attention that certain people, including fans, are criticizing the video either because they don’t like it or because they don’t understand what seems perfectly obvious to me. The video is full of metaphor and messages.
When an artist changes from being heavily managed to being able to express their own creative freedom, you have to think more than a couple of seconds about what they’re trying to convey.
To my eye, the crumbling Greek/Roman infrastructure is a METAPHOR for the crumbling antiquated system of totalitarian authority around them. In my opinion, this has Yoochun written all over it. That is, if they didn’t all come to the conclusion of what this concept should be.
If I wanted to go ‘there’, I could say that crumbling antiquated out-of-date city stands for SM, their former Korean management company. You know, the one that signed them to 13 year contracts, controlled what they did all day, only gave them about a week off each year, took almost all of the money generated by the group, wanted full exclusivity in everything including what each individual member invested their money in, etc., etc., etc.
The way they fly through the air in the video is obviously them taking flight and finding their own thing; leaving that old crumbling antiquated system. Or if I were so bold, dare I say, they are being instrumental in causing it to crumble? Hoho!
The old, crumbling city high above the masses may mean that that the controllers of that old city purposely set these guys (and those like them) high above everybody else, keeping them isolated from everything they know (knew) for a number of years.
The dancing is just part of the song. I mean, come on yall. This ain’t rocket science.
Nobody is saying fans should be forced to like it, but at least try to understand what they may have wanted to convey. It is both an introduction and something that includes part of them/their lives. We care so much that we start to nitpick every damn thing to death and control what WE think they should do, then aren’t we just like those who wanted to control them in the first place?
Not everything has to be a pure visual description of the lyrics to the song. They’ve done a lot of that already and after a while it gets a little boring. How many times can you frolic on the sand with some random girl hired to be in the vid? How many times can you stalk across a club chasing some girl whose name you don’t know? I mean, seriously. That’s been done to death already, especially here in the States.
Creative people are great at adding metaphor with creativity and music to make you think about certain things. Knowing what’s going on in their lives, how can you not see the messages in this video?
In addition, those who are so quick to criticize it need to see whether they are criticizing it because they miss TVXQ or whether they don’t like it because they’re worried about how their fellow Americans will judge the group.
Could I be wrong? Maybe. Maybe they just wanted to be all ‘hard’ with stuff crumbling around them. But if I were a betting woman — and knowing how deep their emotions run — I would put money on there being a deeper meaning behind the MV.
@dongbanger