Modern Korean hip-pop music videos mostly present visually westernized images, which results in lacking of the authentic Korean-ness. I argue in Beenzino’s “How Do I Look” video, it portrays foreign characteristics rather than the Korean ones due to its elements of the sexuality objectification, the challenge of the traditional masculinity and the display of the western street culture.

        

        Women’s body figures have been widely used for producing the music videos, especially in the western music medias, in order to intensively attract more male audience. Asian women has had a long history been objectified as “sex tools” by the westerners during the wartime. Sexism exists for many years and it has been shaped into a modern representation in the modern media, while it is still not appropriate. In “How Do I Look”, a sexy-looking girl in her typical red dress, walks in the laundry room on her high heels. Beenzino represents an ordinary guy, who drools while watching her. She takes off her dress and her under clothes are clearly shown. She shows no shame and sits besides him. This image foreshadows the prostitution works back then. Socialists Xi Lin and Robert Rudolf bring up a hypothesis in their article, “K-pop indeed promotes sexist concepts and the objectification of women, its global success may have negative repercussions on the advancement of gender equality around the world”(2017:29). 

 

          Involving with the homosexual scene emphasizes the soft masculinity and challenges the traditional Korean masculine norm. Nowadays, even though the homosexuality is generally acceptable in the western countries, it is still prohibited to the Korean audience’s acceptance range. Beenzino has brought in these two feminine homosexual roles in the video, which might be more appealing to the western or the modern generation but not to the locals. Two pretty boys flirt with and help each other take off the cloths, showing off their brightly colourful underwear. The boy on the left has a feminine finger gesture, which illustrates the “soft masculinity”. From the general western audience’s perspective, Michael Park explains that, “the construction of Asian masculinity in U.S. popular culture often ties up Asian male bodies as the subject of ridicule and humiliation”(2015:203). Having the boy’s slim body figure in the video weakens the Asian male masculinity’s image to the global audience. However, Park also suggests that Asian masculinity can still be demonstrated as the American one. “Contemporary K-pop acts, however, are predominantly made up of young, fashionable stars who are not afraid to display their sexuality and chiselled bodies, such as Rain, whose physicality and sexuality is explicitly displayed for viewers of his video”(Park 2015:199).

 

                Western street culture has been vividly interpreted during few scenes in the video.  First scene is the “24 HOURS SWAG” label on the detergent box and the same wording in the lyrics. “Swag” is a trendy English term for western hip-pop culture. “While K-Pop has been mixed with Western music genres and styles, the nascent development of English mixing in lyrics of K-Pop is also burgeoning as a unique form of hybridization”(Jin and Ryoo 2014:113-114). However, in Beenzino’s video, it only demonstrates the western culture. Moreover, the scene of the British flag on the window and the scene of the actors swiping the American bills to the floor, both significantly interpret the western street culture. Korean-ness is hardly observed in the video. Lee Hee-Eun in her article identifies nationalism as “culture identity, providing a constructed and yet very real ‘collective memory’, built through the shared framework of familiarity, common patterns of communication, myths and rituals, and social and cultural institutions”(2006:137).  “How Do I Look” interprets none of the values mentioned above. 

            To conclude, Beenzino’s video “How Do I Look” intensively takes references to the western culture and symbolizes little authentic Korean national value from its uses of the women body, soft masculinity and foreign street culture. 

 

Written by Eric

 

Bibliography

 

Jin, Dal Yong and Woongjae Ryoo. "Critical Interpretation of Hybrid K-Pop: The Global-Local Paradigm of English Mixing in Lyrics." Popular Music and Society 37, no. 2 (2014): 113-131.

 

 

Lee, Hee-Eun. “Seeking the ‘Others’ Within Us: Discourses of Korean-ness in Korean  Popular Music.” In Medi@sia: Global Media/tion in and out of Context, edited by Todd Joseph Miles Holden and Timothy J. Scrase, 129-146. New York: Routledge, 2006. 

 

 

Lin, Xi and Robert Rudolf. “Does K-pop Reinforce Gender Inequalities? Empirical Evidence from a New Data Set.” Asian Women33, no. 4 (2017): 27-54.

 

  

Park, Michael. “Psy-Zing Up the Mainstreaming of ‘Gangnam Style’: Embracing Asian Masculinity as Neo  Minstrelsy?” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 3 (2015): 195-212.