It’s been With Eyes East tradition on August 12th to celebrate the birthday of Bomi from Apink, but this year, I actually wanted to pivot a bit – not too far – from Apink to Red Velvet. From what I can tell, their 2022 release “Birthday” is considered one of their lesser singles, and it is indeed an oddity like “Zimzalabim” or “RBB.” The video is a total-war assault of bizarreness, without the slightest threat of context for the events or settings or creatures. We have a cyclops guy like a Tohl Narita Ultraman monster, a yeti guy from, you know, yetis, and the Gingerbread Man but as a king? It’s like a weird, terrible remix of things that we can sort of place, as if assembled by AI or sheer accident. This is what the K-pop channel looks like within the Videodrome signal.
Honestly, clicking through the YouTube video searching for stills, I hit on shots I don’t even remember, and I’ve watched this a dozen times.
As far as the music goes, initially, “Birthday” is easily upstaged by the B-side “On A Ride,” and also had the unfortunate circumstance of being the follow-up to their masterpiece “Feel My Rhythm.” And where “Feel My Rhythm” was epic and elegant, “Birthday” is goofy and weird. But I came around to “Wildside” in a big way, and I’ve also come to really appreciate “Birthday.” I think the key is that, in addition to being many things already, it’s also kind of mean.
Something I like about Red Velvet is that their music tends to have an edge – so subtle as to be deniable – overt in the music videos, but unmistakable in the sound itself. It’s the murder fixation of “Peek-a-Boo” and “Russian Roulette” or the cultlike chants of “Rainbow Halo” juxtaposed with the fast-paced, upbeat sound, the expected cuteness of the genre – sharpening the uber-feminine aesthetic. These girls are disturbed somehow, and they wear pretty dresses as a disguise. Nowhere better is this expressed than the Red Velvet stare:
I feel like Red Velvet and SM have only grown more confident in this theming, though its articulation remains experimental. The video for “Queendom” was a CGI wonderscape, “Feel My Rhythm” was Hieronymus Bosch and Jim Henson. “Birthday” is perhaps the least coherent of them all, which makes it kind of exciting. Having recently celebrated their ninth anniversary, Red Velvet is still willing to reach for new expressions, pawing in the dark like madwomen. “Birthday” didn’t have to top “Feel My Rhythm,” just as “RBB” isn’t a true sequel to their biggest hit “Bad Boy.” It’s like they don’t know when they’ve hit upon a good thing. In this humble fan’s opinion, that might just be because they do every time.
With Eyes East 