Blog 6: Experimental Music Video

The music video I am analyzing is Heffy End by Seo Taiji.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yafnZGVaLrM

Seo Taiji is a contemporary korean artist whose style is said to be the foundation for modern korean popular music. He is considered one of the first korean artists to embrace American influence to the full extent and become a symbol of artistic integration. His music videos often use experimental techniques to match the emotion of his music.

The song Heffy End is about a woman who cannot bear her lover leaving her and decides then to abduct him and keep him imprisoned in her basement so that they can be together "forever".

The song begins a strange collection of scenes: a woman sitting, a girl scribbling, an extreme close up of the pencil pressed against paper, depositing a dark hue onto the snow white paper. Then there is the bouncing of a rotoscoped ball, akin to the one seen in the cartoon in the television. The pencil is placed in a pencil sharpener, and the camera angle makes it seem as if a bullet is being loaded into a revolver. Then a girl places burning letters into order with tweezers, spelling out the title: Heffy End as eerie carnival music plays in the background. Then the song begins.

As the band plays, there is rotoscoping and film scratching. Also, the video is seen through a vignette and strange clips of objects being destroyed are superimposed over the band playing. Then a scene of a woman painting a face on a masked man. The face she paints is smiling but "drawn" tears fall down its face. This suggests that she wants her lover to be happy with her but deep inside he resents it and is unhappy with the arrangement. Then, just as the emotions of the woman and the man split between happy and anguish, the music suddenly goes from soft and instrumental, the raging with screamed vocals, and then suddenly become soft again. This continues for a while.

In the end, the masked man plots his escape and eventually kills his ex lover in order to do so, then the words "Do what you dream" are shown burning, with definitions floating next to each word.