When I ask people why they don’t like listening to music in different languages, their reason is just that...it’s in a different language.
And I always say...so what?
To me, music is a language in itself that connects all of the different languages. You can feel the message and the emotion even if you don’t understand the words. Music videos and on-stage performances help the message come across even more easily.
Noir by Sunmi (listen here on Spotify) is an example of a music video where you can know what she’s saying without actually knowing what she’s saying.
Within the first 30 seconds, you know it’s a song and music video about social media addiction. Here are five themes we can understand without even looking at the translation of the lyrics:
Lack of privacy
There are scenes where Sunmi is on the toilet, and even filming in a hospital bed. A lot of things posted online these days are posts full of information that most would be okay not knowing or seeing.
Staged posts
Sunmi is also taking pictures in front of a backdrop, and pictures of her feet in a sandbox. This is saying that a lot of the things we see on social media aren’t even real, or they’re made to look like something a lot greater than they actually are.
Willingness to do anything
You can see that Sunmi is doing a lot of weird and dangerous things throughout the music video. Anything that happens to her that’s slightly dangerous, she immediately takes out her phone to capture it.
Lack of enjoyment
Sunmi hardly ever smiles throughout the entire video. Her face is almost always blank with no emotion, suggesting that she isn’t enjoying any of these weird things that she’s doing. When she does smile, it’s strained.
Relying on likes
All of the previous things point towards how greatly people rely on likes, followers, and all those kinds of numbers. They’re willing to post about anything, do dangerous things, and go out of their way to fabricate posts just to earn likes. Throughout the video, Sunmi eats candy hearts representing likes as her sustenance for survival.
Now that I’ve talked about five themes from the music video, it’s time for you to watch the music video yourself. English captions are available, but I'd suggest watching it for the first time without the English so you can see that you really don’t need to know what’s being said to understand it.
Can you find any more themes that I didn’t mention?
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