K-Pop Meta: Gashina — Sunmi
Just a girl, a break up, and beauty as currency
K-Pop likes to focus a lot on love because, hey, love songs sell. Hidden in love songs is some universal truth that ties us all together so they usually make good bops. Also universal, is love lost and unrequited. It sucks, but how do you process the emotions of a break-up internally when you feel you were owed something? Afterall, how much effort you put into something, doesn’t equate to an equal a return on that investment. Relationships, unfortunately, do not have trackable ROIs. Enter Gashina, breakout song by Sunmi that was blowing up the charts. You can listen here or watch below:
For visuals, this video is IT. The outfit changes, the lighting, everything was really well done and gave me that semi-abandoned found lot “hey it would be cool to shoot here” affect. I really appreciate the stylist(s) for the video and their willingness to give us so many different yet cohesive looks. Yes girl, werk.
Okay let’s get into the title first. Gashina(가시나) in korean seems to be a play on words mixing the phrase “they’re leaving” and thorns which goes along with the general floral theme. I found that it can be seen as a shorthand for girl (depending on dialect) and also maybe bitch but Sunmi and JYP both insist that bitch is definitely not the meaning. So, all in all this word is abstract. Anyhow, when we start off with the theme of leaving, one wonders what is left behind. Sunmi here, is singing about herself , her virtues and the ideal girl she believes herself to be. That same ideal girl, was left in the dust despite all her valued qualities.
The video opens on our heroine (also another one of songs) at a diner casually sipping on her milkshake, trying to make food consumption look effortless, as her date gets up and leaves. Actually, the date is leaving her and not with her. She looks shocked for a second. She then goes over to his milkshake and downs the entire thing. That cutesy sipping she was doing earlier…was just a show.
She then proceeds to sail through a montage of different rooms and outfits and gets progressively more zainy, wacky, and weird. This is not the polished Sunmi we get before the break-up. Intercut with these scenes are beautiful montages of her dressed as some flower maiden against a huge floral wall. Florals are in fact a heavy visual theme throughout. These images of her as a flower but also as woman who’s kinda pissed, all somehow compete as they mirror how she is internally, versus how she portrayed herself. At once the beautiful flower waiting to be picked, and other times the angry woman that she is. The lyrics amount to as much as she questions how her lover could leave the beautiful rose that she is behind. Though that may be taken as arrogance I take it to mean how she’s in shock at how her performance didn’t get the desired result. She clearly hid parts of herself, went out of her way to be presentable and seductive and he still dumped her.
If anything, this feels like it could relate to a lot of (cis-hetero) relationships where a woman does so much to be liked by a man because that’s what she is supposed to do, or thinks she has to do, to be liked. Of course not every relationship is like this but it seems very timely with our current pop-culture being obsessed with the idea of looking flawless. I don’t think we have taken the time to examine how though we espouse a lot of wonderful ideals on self love that we still uphold very high standards of personal presentation. Love yourself, but love the self that is very polished. This is even more so in South Korea where looks are put on a high pedestal.
I say this not to condem South Korea but to highlight how beauty and the attainment of beauty comes with the idea that other things in life will be easier. In South Korea it is not uncommon for people to get plastic surgery because they believe, for example, that it will help them get a job and for many it does. Beauty becomes tied to not just self esteem, but better quality of life. Thus I see Sunmi’s anger at her ex as her wondering how she put so much into her appearance, yet saw no returns. Of course, he does not owe her his time or his energy and the fact that we don’t see his face works well. We have no basis on which to judge his aesthetic value. Maybe this is less anger with him and more anger at the constructs she lives in. What is a rose without it’s thorns.
So back to the main idea. She sings about herself as an ideal girl but shows herself in sometimes less flattering lights. She seems to be at odds with the girl she wants to be and the girl she is. At the end of the video, Sunmi falls into a bathtub and returns to the land of florals, finally rising out of it all in the same diner as before. She is reborn like a phoenix (nodded to in her dress) but I don’t know if she is reborn as a girl that is more who she really is or like who she is trying to be. Afterall, this is such a double edged sword. Beauty is something that must always be maintained, worked on, catered too. Yet, it’s all so subjective and can run the risk of making women seem shallow, vain, and hollow. Roses are beautiful but they require work and if you aren’t careful, they can prick you. Like beauty, it can alluring but also it can hurt.
That wraps up this week’s K-Pop Meta. Beauty as currency is not just limited to South Korea, it’s global and as old as time. Though beauty can often be seen as something we should all strive for (whether physical or figurative) it can also be limiting. Beauty is subjective and to place so many bets on it is risky. After-all, this may have just been a good revenge “look at me now!” song and nothing more, but, where’s the fun in that?
