“Music videos are the realm of compressed signification.” (Saeji 2016: 285). With that in mind, in this essay I argue that in Block B’s “Don’t Leave”, the music video conveyed a strong sense of sorrowful emotional signification and highlighted links between “two equally powerful entities – textual and material” (Lee 2006: 128) and how they engage through the use of camerawork, color use, lyrics and concept of the song.
Unlike many other K-pop music videos, which usually includes choreographies, this MV is concept and narrative-based with a defining texture of genre where it communicates the song to the audience on an emotional level (Kim 2018: 96). The MV begins with a beach landscape frame in black & white. Then along with slow camera motion, remaining black & white, shows one of the members walking alone on the beach, in slow motion. Within the first 10 seconds of the MV, the sentimental motif and the close connection of the text and pictures can already be emphasized, and set as a mood for the entire video. In addition, the camera works showed very little excitement that every shot is brought together in peaceful movements to link up with the general gist of the song – sorrow and still. Despite of camera movements, eye-level shots and extended zooming out shots were quite common in this MV to create intimacy with the spectator and to deliberately deliver the emotive meaning of “somebody vanishing from your life and leaving the memories behind.”
Another noticeable visual aspect of this MV is the changing color usage. The beginning with black & white and the title vertically written in small black characters have already enforced an idea into the audience that this music video will have visual elements that contributes mainly to the emotional perspective. Following the black & white frames, it interchanges to a world with colors following along a different member’s part. The effect made by the mixture of a bland black & white and a colorful palette infiltrates a dispiteous and decadent yet beautiful sentiment. On top of that, creating two different visual meanings of “my world is black & white with you not in it” and “even if it seems colorful on the outside, my heart is still black & white.”
One scene to point out is at 3:00, is a black and white shot that seems like a plain picture frame. But when observed carefully, it’s a vertical symmetrical frame of the beach landscape, where the bottom is one of the members walking alone. And symmetrically on the top, flipped, is an image of the same member running towards a girl. This shot reflected one of the concept of this MV, a reality vs. dream sequence, as the lyrics corroborate with the scenes, it portraits a contrast between the dream – the beautiful past that once had, and the reality – the broken dream.
As Dr. Saeji says, “Nothing is here by accident.” One of the other notable aspect is reappearance of elements. The slow motion of the camera made it easier to have attention drawn to a specific feature of the video: the city bus terminal. The word “terminal” can permeate two meanings: farewell and reunion. It is distinctively shown that this song is about farewell but can also indicate the hope to meet again whereas it is designed to deliver the despair in the loss of love through the existence of a repeating element – the bus terminal – signifying a symbolic context of an emotion using a fixed signal (Auslander 2015: 321).
“Music videos have come to present a wondrous realm of senses, evocations, empathies and kinesthesia, a mixture of melody, light, rhythm, costumes, beat, and movement” (Kim 2018: 95). In Block B’s “Don’t leave”, text and motion pictures come together to successfully convey not just a plain expression of sadness but rather implications of a specific emotion that is shown through detailed textual and visual elements of the video.
Bibliography
Auslander, Philip. “Everybody’s in Show Biz: Performing Star Identity in Popular Music.” In The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, edited by Andy Bennett and Steve Waksman. 317-31. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, and Washington DC: SAGE reference, 2015.
Kim, Sukyoung. K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Lee, Hee-Eun. “Seeking the “others” within us: Discourses of Korean-ness in Korean Popular Music.” In medi@sia: Global Media/tion In and Out of Content, edited by Todd Joseph Miles Holden and Timothy J. Scrase. 128-46. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.
Saeji, Cedarbough T. “Cosmopolitan Strivings and Racialization: The Foreign Dancing Body in Korean Popular Music Videos.” In Korean Screen Culture: Interrogating Cinema, TV, Music and Online Games, edited by Andrew David Jackson and Colette Balmain. 257-92. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien: Peter Lang, 2016.
Block B 