#can't believe this group has me talking about my nemesis: psychoanalytic theory

[marginalias]

relistened to the album a few times and i actually love skinz - it’s probably my favorite track, but that’s because i’ve been on an industrial/noise kick for the past year - and thematically ip2 does feel like ip1′s evil twin (skinz>libido, suit dance>instinct, gaslighting>byredo, ult bliss>tog, it even has the same progression lol)

some thoughts (music, performance, mv, lore), maybe too many thoughts

ip2 is a really good album but absolutely feels like it’s gone through a massive transformation from whatever the initial concept was - i feel like i can hear a few points where the lines have been redistributed, it might just be confirmation bias and presumably a lot of this stuff has been rearranged/restructured/rewritten to better fit a group without... their... lead... vocalist...... brb have to go smash my head through a cinderblock

ANYWAY

thoughts on the music: oh they’ve done it again my god. skinz/gaslighting genuinely addictive, put ult bliss in the MOMA, suit dance just genuinely nice and fun. all their performances are incredible and their repertoire of vocal techniques has expanded unbelievably in the past year. extremely extremely impressed with kyubin in particular, especially because they autotuned the shit out of that man in asoiaf and now they’ve figured out how to use more of his natural vocal color/his technique has improved so much! love hearing mill get more lines, killing the rap verses even though they should have perhaps rewritten the gaslighting verse to not contain the word “teetering” just my opinion. they’re really playing with texture and dynamics as well - whispering, growling, belting, falsetto, WHOEVER WAS SINGING AT 2:09 IN SKINZ I WILL --dialup noises-- like i almost ascended.

i still think ip1 is the stronger album in terms of unity of concept - suit dance my beloved i am still not entirely sure where you fit in this album of toxic possessive sm anthems but you’re doing great mwah

thoughts on the stage performances: genuinely if not for the skinship bits, it’s just a solid sexy bg performance. it’s kind of down there with sage in terms of coherency - there are a lot of disparate parts interspersed with cool points. i think the “death drive” concept behind ip2 (restoring earlier states of being with the end goal being nonexistence) explains the repetition of a lot of previous choreo (i counted designer, dora maar, asoiaf, savanna, libido, maaaybe angel? and love’s characteristic power gesture that he likes to do while belting ok cry break). i think if the original lore was intact all of this would make so much more sense as a death drive concept (starts with libido, ends with savanna) and tie into the time travel narrative from dpj/lsg.

based on that, if you held a gun to my head and made me guess, i would say the skinz choreo has been in the works at least since the end of libido promos and they didn’t have the budget to create something out of whole cloth after aug 2, so we’re seeing them change up the formations slightly to disguise the fact that there’s an even number of members. the first stage had some holes in formations that probably only showed up because of comeback nerves. kpop performances lend themselves better to odd numbers of performers --gritting my teeth-- but astro and oneus make 6 work, and i think shinhwa was a 6 member group, so it’s not impossible, just not the most convenient number to work with. but i think this was pretty clearly originally designed for 7.

also oh my god i had forgotten how much i LOOOOOVE popping and locking bless them for giving mill that little spotlight.

thoughts on the skinz mv/lore: booooo it was funded by thoughts and prayers. would not be surprised if they blew their actual funds on an mv shoot with all 7 members in july and then had to reshoot this in nov/dec after delaying their fall comeback long enough to revise the whole album and oh i will stop there before going full doomer about 8d’s financial ruination.

the mv itself is pretty but feels like a really weak refrain to libido, where you have these intimate shots and innuendos representing the ego/conscious in color (junji-rie lollipop scene is highly underrated as one of the most shockingly sexual parts of the libido mv btw and i haven’t seen anyone talk about this) and then sink the viewer into the black and white realm of the id and subconscious desire. it does a really good job of highlighting the point choreography too.

if libido is about the entanglement of repressed sexual desire and divinity and creation, then we would expect the title track of ip2 to be destrudo or mortido and for the album to talk about monstrous/consuming sexuality and gross mortality and destruction. and the MUSIC!!!! DOES THAT!!

but the mv is sort of a flat sketch of the music - skinz is about the death drive (destrudo/mortido) as repetition and restaging of scenes from earlier in life, the eruption of the past into the present, the desire for destruction at the hand of a romantic/sexual partner - and the mv is about, um, a fan’s desire to be accepted and possessed by their idols in the most G-rated way possible, i guess? there’s not really a way to y/n your way into a choreography without a backup dancer which they absolutely cannot afford right now, so i’m seriously wondering what the id (b/w) portions are supposed to be representing. a fan’s sexual appetite for their idols underlying benign fantasies? if we were going to go this route i think we should have also gotten voyeuristic handicam aspect ratio from inside the choreography, as if someone was inserting themselves into both the id and ego of the video and “possessing”/restaging the full experience of the libido mv.

also it’s cool that they literally “restaged” the mv on the black platform! not entirely sure what the glitch/artifacting effects are meant to indicate - maybe artificiality and simulation - but they do remind me of this brian eno quote:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. (from A Year With Swollen Appendices)

speaking of aspect ratio why were the color/ego shots pillarboxed so inconsistently? are we actually communicating different things when the color shots are letterboxed vs pillarboxed? because the taped footage from the practice studio in the beginning has the same aspect ratio as the shots that are supposed to be a fan’s y/n fantasy, but seems to communicate that someone is observing? am i looking too hard into an mv that clearly has a budget of whatever mom had in her wallet at the moment? the answer is probably yes but i just want to believe in competence so bad.

i wonder if the original mv concept was more grimy? i know a lot of people were theorizing that someone would die, and i was ready for a kind of dc deja vu/oneus tbontb thing where people are killing each other offscreen, but from the skinz mv teaser i was expecting “smack my bitch up” by the prodigy, and it has echoes of that - initial scene with the car as the hit and run, the ktv room as the bar, the beach as the strip club - without the misogyny (thankfully), recreational drugs (would probably get them banned in korea), or violence (boo). again, might be confirmation bias, especially since the first person shooting style was probably chosen for budgetary reasons, but i would have loved to see that sort of destructive/self-destructive all-night bender rampage, especially because the “smack my bitch up” mv was incredibly controversial and highly censored and i know jaden jeong is probably into that kind of thing.

anyway i will update this if the suit dance mv has anything to say but i have no idea at this point so i will conclude my thoughts after saying that i hope they haven’t actually ditched the lore. doesn’t seem like it at least music-wise but holy smokes this mv was dire. maybe i’m missing something! who knows! someone else figure out the aspect ratio thing please and perhaps this will all make sense.