MBLAQ

Damn, I wasn't going to keep posting, but then Brian upped the ante. So here's my response, another Asian act: MBLAQ, which, as Wikipedia notes, is "an acronym for Music Boys Live in Absolute Quality" and, as Wikipedia does not note, has the word "black" in it when you say it out loud, which signals just how ruff and tuff these guys are.

MBLAQ are from South Korea and they are headed up by the singer Rain. I guess most of this song is not in English but that chorus -- "Oh Yeah" -- speaks the universal language of cheezy pop. I have to say that I kind of love this video. It's incredibly ridiculous but so unapologetic in the way it collides and robs from and recycles various genres of dance music that it kind of succeeds on its own demented terms.



Question: did the guy in the middle at the start of the video get his pants from MC Hammer?

Note, incidentally, how aspects of this video (e.g. the weird dripping black ink, shot in black and white, at the beginning and end) seem to be drawing from the same vein of quasi-gothic/S&M inspiration as (and/or just plain biting the style of) Jay-Z's video for "On To the Next One," below. But as with every other aspect of the style of this group, the gothic thing is just sort of alluded to in passing, without any particular intensity. It sort of looks, in fact, like some art director just decided to tack on some random "drippy black ink" bits to the start and end of the video in order to ride the "drippy black ink" cultural current, in spite of the fact that this motif is never incorporated into the body of the video.