#pop analysis

‧₊ Berghain ♪ ˚⊹

A (not so) brief reflection on Rosalia's song "Berghain"

Hello, my angelzz! (I don't know who I'm talking to, I don't have any followers... let's ignore that). As a HUGE fan of Rosalía's latest album, I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts on one of her songs (Berghain) with the English-speaking community. Hope you enjoy it and PLEASE listen to this song, it will heal you.

TW: sex mentioned in the lyrics of the song, with a violent tone.

N/A: probably multiple grammar/spelling mistakes as english isn't my first language. its pretty long. sorry if some parts are difficult to understand/messy. i know that many people may not interpret the lyrics in the same way as me, but reminder that im not trying to discover the truth hidden between Rosalia’s song, instead, i’m just presenting how *I* personally view it.

I don’t know the precise moment it hit me. Maybe it was my umpteenth night staying up doing “homework” until 2AM, pun intended, as an excuse to marathon another round of favorites from 2NE1, Girls Generation and friends. Maybe it was the morning after in another Korean Lit class, as I stabbed myself in the leg with my sharpest pencil as our teacher fed us ten more things to underline. The way I see it, though, it was probably the very moment before I was about to succumb to my exhaustion when the same teacher drifted to a different topic: Korean pop stars.

“You can memorize all of these morons’ songs and dances, so why can’t you memorize this poem?” he roared. I realized he was right, but not in the way he intended. I have to confess that I’ve learned more as a consumer and analyst of pop music than I’ve learned from most of my actual classes. And based off of my experiences, I’d like to propose that students and teachers in Korea begin to bring pop music (and maybe even pop culture) into the classroom—because I think it’d do all of us a lot of good.

The first reason is engagement. It goes without saying that it’s difficult to get students pumped up about learning. Take literature, for instance. Literature education in Korea basically amounts to a laundry list of antiquated poems and novels we’re expected to be acquainted with; not only is this curriculum boring, it’s also counterproductive. It limits the scope of what students are encouraged to know while avoiding or outright discouraging an analytical approach to texts; it also suggests that only works preordained as important matter and completely dismisses the works that most directly impact and influence students’ lives. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we should throw our textbooks out the window and base our classes off of YouTube’s Top 100, and I’m not arguing that we should. Rather, I’d like to see a focus on classic material enhanced with one on the everyday. If discussing something like “Gee,” something students will not only be more familiar with but also be more enthusiastic about, can help them sharpen analytical and technical skills, what’s stopping teachers from trying?

Some would argue that pop music is too insubstantial to be worth studying. I beg to differ; if anything, it’s because it’s relevant that we must learn to study it. Any work of art has merit because all works of art consist of choices made by artists, and discussing these choices and the implications they have, we have a standard by which to evaluate the significance of any story, song, or film. Furthermore, pop culture is a reflection of the society in which it is created and can be studied from a variety of different perspectives. 2NE1’s music opens up dialogues about feminism, hip-hop culture, and even cultural appropriation (as evidenced by a recent controversy in which member Dara was criticized for wearing a bindi, an important Hindu symbol, in the “Falling In Love” music video); PSY’s subversion of Korean economic and cultural norms offers potential for discussion of his technique and his motive; some could even argue that Sistar’s woeful ballads provide insight into how han, a traditional Korean characteristic, operates in a modern industrial society, just to give a more academically-minded example. As insipid as these songs may sound when we’re trying to tune them out on the radio, they’re just as part of the Korean culture as more highly-esteemed works of literature or history are, and students need to be able to apply the same skills they’ll apply on their exams to things outside the classroom.