A video analysis essay of “Good Bye Bye” by NU’EST Qiangsheng

This song truly excels at delivering the multi-media effects through members of Nu’est singing and dancing in synchronized perfection. In this essay, I argue that various visual tools convey its message of overcoming personal struggles and embracing the new self, which creates spatial and emotional rapport between the fans and the Nu’est, making hallyua fully integrated body of the global culture.

In the video of Good Bye Bye, just as Kim Suk-young states in the book “K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance (Kim 2018, 167),” each member effectively conveys their own struggles through the extensive use of multi-facet visual tools. JR shows his agony by swallowing a fish, a visual for sucking up the defamation and continuing his life. Both of Ren and Baekho’s pain comes from a conflict of self-identity: the rose Ren vomits serves as a symbolic meaning of the contrast between his outer and inner self, and the scene in which Baekho shedding his mask through tearing apart the wall paper tells that he is afraid to embrace his true identity. Arons’ struggle, on the other hand, is delivered to the audience using lighting effects. Through the scene of him being exposed to beams of lights coming from the window shades, the audience immediately feel his longlines of being separated from his family.

Those pain are illustrated and reinforced which made audience not only aware of but able to sympathize with the idols. Throughout the video storyline scene intertwined with the scene of synchronized dancing and singing. This sudden transition contributes to a psychology effect in the audience (Hwang, 2018): their idols, though glamorous, are just as the same as themselves, thereby creating a stronger bond between the fans and the idols.

A sudden switch of then appeared as the audience see members of Nu’est break free and start embracing themselves. The scene where everyone jumps up and dancing with fireworks, accompanied by the warm tone lighting, which is in sharp contrast to the cold dim lighting earlier, delivers a super contagious uplifting atmosphere. Though not a live performance, the frequent use of pauses, blackouts, the push and pull between theatrics effects and the choreography, all together enables viewers to feel, as if audiences become “one living organism whose sole purpose of existence was to respond to every beat of the rhythm (Kim 2018, 216).”

This made me think of the theories proposed by Young Min Beak, stating that K-pop cross-cultural consumption of media content is supported both by cultural proximity hypothesis and cultural exoticism hypothesis (Beak, 2015). And I think one possible explanation of this seemingly contradictory phenomenon lies at the feeling of aliveness, as described by Kim Suk-young. Those visual effects create a “more ontological definition of “live (Kim 2018, 217)” – a feeling of aliveness as if idols were standing right in front of me. To this end, the rapport emerges among members who share the feelings, space, though virtually, and purpose of their idols, which in this case, is the Nu’est.

To conclude, the extensive use of facial expression and gestures, lighting effects, along with the music and the choreography enable the building and delivery of the storyline. This serves as a conduct for building the spatial and emotional rapport, which, in turn, facilitates the widespread of K-pop waves in the international media industry.

Bibliography

Beak, Young Min. “Relationship Between Cultural Distance and Cross-Cultural Music

Video Consumption on YouTube.” PhD diss., Social Science Computer Review, 2015.

Elfving-Hwang. “K-pop idols and celebrity.” PhD diss., Routledge Handbook, 2018.

Kim, Suk-young. K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance.Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2018.