Korean popular music is not only known for its catchy lyrics and danceable rhythm, but also well-known for the excellent music videos. The extraordinary visual impact of music videos is also one of the reasons why Kpop has a worldwide success. Other than the choreography, most of the music videos usually have a story line running through the whole video. In addition, the use of English lyrics is also common in Kpop to help with the rhyming and promote globalization. Rain’s “I Do” music video is a perfect hybridization of choreography, English lyrics and romantic love story. It is the combination of those elements that leads to the success of this song.
Since the name of this song “I Do” is in English other than Korean, we can tell that the English mixing in lyrics in Korean popular music is really common and is a positive way to promote cultural hybridization. As Dal Yong Jin and Woongjae Ryoo stated in their article, the success of Korean music industry is primarily due to the fully utilize of the hybridization of English and global resource (Jin and Ryoo 122). Rain’s song “I Do” was the Korean singer’s second big hit in Asia. This huge success was more or less benefit from the English mixing in lyrics in this song. The lyrics such as the repeatedly “I do. I do” and “I do wanna spend my life with you” perfectly rhyme with the Korean lyrics. Therefore created a romantic atmosphere throughout the whole music video.
As for the story line in this music video, it starts from a boy (Rain) shooting a love song video for his girlfriend in his messy room, and then he moves to the street and passes by many loving couples and finally meets his girlfriend in the restaurant. It’s not hard to find that, the whole music video, especially the beginning part, the story setting, box sets and relationship between two main characters, are quite similar the the settings of Korean drama. As Yukie Hirata mentioned in her article, it is the big boom of the Korean drama ‘Winter Sonata’ that brought the cultural and social phenomenon called the Korean wave, or Hallyu, to Japan in 2004 (Chua 2008). We can see from this case that Korean dramas are popular amount women not even in Korean. Therefore, no wonder the Korean drama-like settings of the ‘I Do’ music video took advantage of this and became a hit.
Another aspect that makes this song such a big success is the dramatic change of persona and clothing of Rain in this music video. Before this music video, Rain’s image is a tough guy with muscles, and he is always shirtless or wears a little in his previous music videos. However, in the “I Do” music video, he is wearing white, which is a tamer and non-provocative color. And his hair is down, he’s always smiling and there’s no suggestive shots taken by the camera. These suggest that in this music video, Rain has transformed form his previous image, tough muscular guy to the more traditional Korean aesthetics, the soft masculinity. The author Sun Jung says in his book that there is increasing acceptance and preference for the gender blending images shown by the Kpop boy bands(Sun 2011). Therefore, the soft masculinity side of Rain in the “I Do” music video must be an eye-popper and refresh for the visual audience and this transformation definitely contributes to the success of this song.
In conclusion, it is the combination of choreography, hybridization of English lyrics and romantic love story line in the music video that discussed above that makes Rain’s song “I Do” a great hit.
References:
Beng Huat Chua and Koichi Iwabuchi. East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. Hong Kong University Press, 2008.
Dal Yong Jin & Woongjae Ryoo (2014) Critical Interpretation of Hybrid K-Pop: The Global-Local Paradigm of English Mixing in Lyrics, Popular Music and Society, 37:2, 113-131, DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2012.731721
Sun Jung. Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption: Yonsama, Rain, Oldboy, K-pop idols. Hong Kong University Press, 2011.