Greatest Hits:: Hyo (Girls' Generation): Sober

 The final song of my little triptych of Sober songs to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of BIGBANG's debut, and I went with a contemporary soloist. Girls' Generation is only a year younger than BIGBANG and occupies much the same role as BIGBANG does in the canon, just on the girl group side. So it really worked out that there is a soloist from Girls' Generation that has a song with the same name as Sober because that also gives us a different texture to look at. Plus, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that the impact Girls' Generation and its members have had on the industry cannot be hyped enough, especially when their activity has slowed down a little and I've seen younger or newer fans mistakenly dismiss them just because they're not pulling the streaming or release numbers like the streaming farms for some of the other groups. But that's why I do the research and hand y'all the results: to make the context around the last 30+ years of K-Pop fun for people who may not have thought about looking back at songs from before they were born or came out years before they ever thought about listening to K-Pop.

Hyo (full name Hyoyeon) debuted as a main dancer and main rapper of Girls' Generation all the way back in 2007 and debuted as a full soloist back in 2016 so her career is nothing to sneeze at. And just as a side note, I think she's really funny.

Sober is her first single, which was released in 2018, under her new stage and DJ name, Hyo. That's right. She's a DJ too. Our sole lyricist is Shin Agnes (Red Velvet, EXO, NCT, LOONA, Super Junior, SHINee, ONF, S.E.S, CLC, TVXQ!, ALICE, AOA, Ladies Code, Stellar, Golden Child, 9Muses, Melody Day, Rainbow, and BOYFRIEND). The composers are Bynon (Taeyeon and BoA), Ryan Henderson (Taeyeon and BoA), Aurora Pfeiffer (Jessi, BoA, AOA, and Taeyeon), Lena Leon (NCT, Everglow, IVE, RANIA, AOA, and 4TEN), Hyo (GOT the Beat, Taeyeon, and Hitchhiker), and Ummet Ozcan. Fun fact about this one, it hit number one on the iTunes charts in eleven different countries.

• Group: Girls' Generation (SNSD)
• Debut Date: 2016 December 02
• Company: SM Entertainment
• Status: Active
• Album : Sober
• Song: Sober
• Release Date: 2018 April 18

This music video is an actual piece of art. And also, I can feel generations of feminine rage welling up inside of me right now. 

It's a fun time to be me right now with the number of conflicting emotions that I've got going on.

Yes, the music video has a warning that it may be disturbing to some viewers. But here's the thing, this music video came in direct response to certain things that were happening at the time. Let's see, what was going on in 2018 in South Korea?

Upskirt photos.

Exploitation and blackmail of the highest degree against women.

Death.

And in response, a lot of women started fighting back, with one of the most famous movements ramping up a few months after this music video came out called "Escape the Corset Movement", which echoed the protests in 1968 in the US over beauty standards in beauty pageants.

Making someone ashamed of what they look like as a person allows them to be controlled and manipulated by others and makes it easier to inflict emotional or psychological harm, or even physical harm. It's a control tactic that's as old as time. Make someone believe that they're worth nothing without [insert thing here] and they'll do anything for that external validation, even when that validation is not healthy. 

And what do we see in the music video?

Pinching "extra" skin in front of a mirror. Posing in front of magazine cutouts of an "ideal" face. Shaving legs. One of those is less like the others, but realistically all of those are manipulation tactics to make you think that you're somehow less if you're not some "ideal" that's likely to change in the next twenty years. It reminds me of Dr. Steinman from BioShock, and that came out ten years before this music video did. "It's just a video game; it's not that deep", I quote in a mocking tone. To which I say, Zombie by The Cranberries is just a song.

It also reminds me of the song What A Way To Wanna Be! by Shania Twain, which was released in 2003 and was one of the first CDs that was actually mine and not inherited from my mother. The song is literally condemnation of the beauty and diet industries and some of the relevant lyrics are "I don't wanna wear that/It only makes me look fat/Time to tone my thighs, gotta lose another size, yeah/What a way to wanna be/Exfoliate, look great/Feel guilty 'bout what you ate/You're buying all the books/To learn the latest looks, yeah/What a way to wanna be".

But I think one of the most poignant parts of the music video is at the end, when we have what is very clearly a similitude of a funeral tableau, which also could be a reference to The Lady of Shalott, which is in turn inspired by an Arthurian legend and an Italian poem. 

For those of you who are not English literature majors or have an interest in Victorian poets or know Anne of Green Gables or pay attention to Arthurian legends, this is unequivocally a tragedy. The Lady was cursed so she couldn't look upon Camelot directly or she'd die, and so she viewed the world through a mirror. One day, one of the knights of Camelot, I don't remember who, was riding past her window and she thought he was so beautiful that she had to look on him with her own two eyes, so she looked out her window and beheld this beautiful knight. He rode on unawares. She fled her tower, laid down in a boat, and died floating down the river. This is of course grossly simplified, but the image of her in the boat is very reminiscent of the woman here in this music video in the bed of flowers surrounded by the other women, some masked and some not, standing watch over her with the flares.

Flares are an emergency use item to alert others that help is needed and that there is a problem. Those four women stand there in the rain holding the flares, sentinels and guardians for the one who has died, until they throw the flares and their hope of a rescue away. Their Lady is dead because of beauty and no hope is coming for her or them. It's seemingly very bleak, but there's a power there in choosing themselves over waiting for someone else to come rescue them from their circumstances.

And the scene where Hyo cut her hair? There were women in South Korea who were hired at jobs and then fired on their first day because they showed up without makeup and with short hair. Hyo is doing that herself. It is her choice to look like that and to defy the traditional standards of beauty, and I love the symbolism of freedom where she lets her shorn hair be taken by the wind.

Hyo actually spends the entire music video being the representation of freedom, and I think it's particularly worth looking back at this right now. I've noticed some very worrying characteristics about y'all younger than me, especially the under-twenty-fives and I just want to give you all a hug (permission pending) because so much has been stolen from y'all's childhoods because of social media and the fear of being recorded and being ridiculed for being less than perfect. It's a common complaint I see among my generation that when y'all go to the clubs, you don't dance. Now, I wouldn't recommend going to the clubs like my generation did, but I think the Millennial refusal to "grow up" and be boring on the outside stems from the fact that that's how we're dealing with everything that we've had to deal with. Y'all are dealing with a lot of the same stuff, with the added societal pressures of social media and the fact that almost everyone has a video camera on hand at all times. That's scary and not fair for y'all because if you do something silly, someone might record it and put it online and then you go viral and people make fun of you for being silly, which will discourage you from doing it again. Which is why Hyo is so important to watch in this music video. She dances her way through it like nobody's watching. Granted, she's a trained dancer, but the point still stands. Why be Rachel and afraid to run like you don't have a care in the world when there are people around when you can be Phoebe and do what brings you joy, even if people judge you?

Find your joy and love yourself. Wear the mismatched clothes. Wear the Christmas shirts in June and Halloween shirts in July. It's the best rebellion there is. 

And this comment from @hyotmess claims that Hyo explained the music video as "The music video is about liberating girls who feel trapped, and tired of the norm. I wanted to express that they can get out there, rebel against social norms and show everyone who they're really meant to be." 

To quote her company seniors, "I'm a trouble, break the rules like a rebel."

Hyoyeon debuted as a DJ with this song, so I'm just going to casually toss y'all a clip of her DJ work, and even though it's less than a minute long, it's fun, it's joyful, it's people jumping up and down like there aren't cameras there. 

But I also found an actual performance of this back in 2023 in Vietnam. So here! Have a fancam!

She's not dancing about on the stage. There's no choreography. She's just up there vibing on stage with her blue tips to her hair and the occasional hype to the crowd to jump.

This is just a very comfortable performance and she's got one of her in-ears out. 

At :39, she stops singing to let the backtrack take it for a moment, and that makes it acutely obvious when she's singing and when she's not. Which I love for her. 

And you know what? Because there aren't a ton of videos for this other than the plethora of lyric and color-coded lyrics videos for this song, I'm going to drop something a bit unusual this time around.

I love the rhythm tapping games. I call them the "tappy tappy games". But there's something remarkably hypnotic about them that I enjoy because my brain actually gets quiet. It turns out that watching someone do it achieves the same effect.

So I'm going to give you a screen captured video from SMTown Superstar.

This person did Sober on Hard and got three stars. Watching this was very calming, which fits the sound of the song as well. I hope you find it calming as well.

And there we go! It's a little bit of a short one this time, just because we don't have a lot of videos of this being performed, and so ends the triptych of songs called "Sober". We had the youthful DKB singing about not wanting to be sober to hit up the hottie, we had ten-year-old BIGBANG singing about how much being an adult sucks and how hard it is to be sober, and now we have Hyo bringing us home with a song about accepting your own imperfections. There are three more Sober songs that I can find, so I may do this again just to round out the batch of Sober songs. But for now, here officially ends my August songs. Even though this is September that I'm posting in. I'm late. It's fine. This literally won't matter in a few months. But here we are.

If you've got some songs you'd like me to cover, Champions, go ahead and drop a comment! Tell me what song you're itching to tell people about and I will do my best to assist you in that. Or, if you're shy and don't want people to know you want it, only me, go ahead and fill out The Form for me. I'm the only person who sees any responses because I am a one woman show over here.

Thanks for reading! I hope you like the song!

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