③Pour Up

Video Analysis of “Pour Up”

According to Um (2013), Korean popular music seemed to have moved from ‘being dominantly aural to visual’ since the end of 1990. Music videos of K-pop stars also follow the trend as there is an increasing focus of visual aspects in the production. Visual elements usually serve to beautify the music video and lead it to a higher level of quality, while visual elements are used in Dean’s “Pour Up” music video to convey the same message to its lyrics.

As K-pop is driven by the visual (Epstein with Turnbull 2014:316), music videos start to link the lyrics or music itself to the visual aspects appearing in the music video. In the Dean’s music videos of “Pour Up,” the atmosphere of love, danger, and seduction of a broken relationship created in its lyrics is fully reflected by the visual elements in the music video. The first element used is the background, the background setting in the music video is the plane graveyard with few crashed airplanes. These crashed aircraft could be considered as the indication of the crashed relationship described in the song, and these airplanes might be a symbol of escape by referring to the lyrics, which tells the story of heartbreak and the man is trying to forget the memories with smoke and liquor. Moreover, the lyrics of “Pour Up” implies the two characters have some acts of physical intimacy like a sex scene. However, the sex scene is not directly performed in the music video; the music video delivers the message through the choice of location, which is a critical factor in the composition of a music video. The location of the background in the second half of the video is a big house which has a similar setting like a hotel infrastructure, which is a clear implication of the sex scene in the lyrics.

Another strong visual element used to deliver the message of lyrics is the female character in the music video. In Korea, more and more clips of Korean girl groups showing their long, flawless legs in the music video, concerts and TV performances, even award ceremonies in the winter. It suggests that the display of slender legs has become a popular trend in K-pop (Epstein with Joo 2012:4). This opinion has been proven in the music video of “pour up,” a female character plays a significant role in building up the mysterious and sexual atmosphere, which fits the concept of the lyrics and the genre of the music. The woman dresses in a sexy way, wearing the backless split skirt which can easily for others to see through the slender legs and slim back. This female character is styled in the traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance and outfit coded for strong visual and erotic impact, and woman viewed as a sexual object is the concept of erotic spectacle (Mulvey 1975:11).

The idea that Dean uses visual elements to convey the same information of the lyrics of “pour up” can also be proven by the colour used in the music video. The majority music video is colourful, but when it comes to the sexual part in the lyrics, the colour switches from the normal ones to the black and white filter with some noise to blur the image. The black and white filter makes the atmosphere even more ambiguous, leaving audiences more space to imagine what is happening afterward even they don’t know about the lyrics.

This article had examined that there is a link between the visual elements and the lyrics in the music video of Dean’s “pour up”, with the location, female character and the colour used as examples to illustrate the multiformity of visual aspects can be when they used to convey the consistent information as the lyrics.

References

Epstein, Stephen and James Turnbull. “Girls’ Generation? Gender, (Dis)Empowerment, and K- pop.” In The Korean Popular Culture Reader, edited by Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe. 314-36. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Epstein, Stephen, and Rachel M. Joo. “Multiple Exposures: Korean Bodies and the Transnational Imagination.” Asia-Pacific Journal 10, no. 33 (2012): 1-24.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.

Um, Hae-Kyung. “The Poetics of Resistance and the Politics of Crossing Borders: Korean Hip-Hop and ‘Cultural Reterritorialization’.” Popular Music 32, no. 1 (2013): 51-64.

Junwei Sun
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