What a Fool Believes

After School: “Shampoo”

It wasn’t long after I entered the office today that the Pitchfork article on K-Pop started a discussion.  I work in a room with six other people.  There’s usually a news item or video thrown out sometime during the day to provide a break from the slog.  K-Pop has actually been thrown out there before.  Another gentleman in our department—but in a different room—is a K-Pop fan.  He’s a Charmin bear of a man and his infatuation with several of these groups was passed along to one of us via Messenger, followed by an in-person symposium in our room.

The part of today’s K-Pop article that sparked the biggest discussion was the video for “Shampoo” by After School.  What’s fascinating to me—and most of the others in my room—are the videos.  The music is like being water-boarded with Jolt Cola, Pixy Stix and Pop Rocks.  The videos—sugary delusions themselves yet much easier to swallow with muted sound—are a pastiche of visual influences, some specific to Korea and therefore exotic to those foreign, others foreign to Koreans and exotic and intriguing to them.  What I really enjoy about them is how abstract they remain, how open to interpretation.  Take “Shampoo” for example.  There were several different theories as to what in the fuck was happening in this video.  There was a clear Flashdance reference with the hazy, sunlit dance room.  A coworker added to that reference that the blonde-haired version of the new girl was a ghost, the memories of their tryst haunting the teacher.  Another coworker posed that the teacher was a “pre-cog”, a la Minority Report, able to see the blonde-haired future of the sweet new girl of the dance group, and her possible bedroom-bound demise due to a terminal illness that was discovered after having her ankle checked out due to a fall in practice.  My own theory was that there was a Vertigo thing happening.  There was a blonde-haired dancer who looked identical to the new girl, was in a relationship with the teacher, but died.  The new girl comes along, reminds the teacher, and some of the other dancers, of the blonde.  The teacher begins a relationship with the new girl but she reminds him of the blonde, which upsets him and gives him headaches.  The other dancers then turn the new girl into the blonde, dying her hair, teaching her how to dance.  The teacher sees this, flees the dance studio and the story is to be continued.

Which is the accurate take on this video?  None.  All.  That’s the beauty of it.  The abstraction leaves it open for interpretation.  Granted, this isn’t fascinating in itself.  What’s fascinating are the possible interpretations the video provides.  The Ghost of Flashdance?  Minority Report and Shuffle?  Vertigo Waltz?  These are insane and fun possibilities.  And who knows what the sequel will bring?  Maybe the Philip K. Dick will lead them to William Gibson and some Neuromancer gets tossed in.  Maybe more Hitchcock or one of his students, like Brian De Palma, and Blow Out is absorbed.  I probably shouldn’t find out though.  I fear this is a slippery slope.  I fear that my fascination with some of these videos will put me in a K-Hole of sugary abstractions and delusions.  Oh wait.  My mind’s already well beyond that.  Please continue After School.