Jonathan Emmesedi<p>🧵 3/3</p><p>...Chris Brown -- Back to Sleep<br><a href="https://youtu.be/OQLuhelCaDQ?si=xdbJNEJ2rT_Aqbx7" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">youtu.be/OQLuhelCaDQ?si=xdbJNE</span><span class="invisible">J2rT_Aqbx7</span></a></p><p>The songs do differ, so it's not a case of plagiarism, but it's quite clear that "Crash" draws on the older song.</p><p>Three lines of thought came to mind.</p><p>In the first place, I wondered - not for the first time - how my feelings about Kpop would change if I listened to more western popular music.</p><p>A quick look at the Wikipedia entry on "Back to Sleep" made it clear to me how well known the song had been on its release in 2015. I felt taken aback; am I the only "Crash" listener not to have been aware of the songs' similarities? What would have been my initial reaction to "Crash" had I heard the Chris Brown song first?</p><p>Of course Kpop recycles western popular music, just as western popular music in the past (certainly) and in the present (probably) recycles both its own products and music from other sources. Consequently, my feelings are not those of the viewer abashed when the painting one has admired turns out to be a forgery, but rather those of a reader who, on turning from a mass market paperback version of a beloved text to the annotated scholarly edition, discovers all the sources and allusions previously unnoticed.</p><p>These thoughts on background knowledge reminded me of a consideration about our responses to music and art in general: just as perception is never simply an impression via the senses on a tabula rasa, so we never look at the visual arts with an "innocent eye" or listen to music without pre-existing concepts, sensibilities, and memories. That tabula full of ideas, far from being an obstacle to our disinterested appreciation, is what what makes our aesthetic experience possible. Without the tabula plena, we would be hard put to recognize the art and the music within our visual and aural experience.</p><p>My final thought concerned the lyrics and visuals of the Chris Brown MV. "Crash" was a B side for which no MV was made, but even so one can see from the stage how it differed in feel from the erotically charged American video. In addition, the Korean lyrics have nothing like the explicit sexual language of "Back to Sleep". As such, a comparison reveals a striking difference between South Korea and the USA with regard to the representation of sex in popular culture. Whether one is "better" than the other is a question that interests me less than why these two cultures differ so much in this respect.</p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/Kpop" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Kpop</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RandB" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RandB</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/RnB" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>RnB</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/ChrisBrown" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ChrisBrown</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/BackToSleep" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>BackToSleep</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Crash" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Crash</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Aesthetics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Aesthetics</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/PopularCulture" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>PopularCulture</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/AmericanCulture" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AmericanCulture</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/USCulture" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>USCulture</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/SouthKoreanCulture" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SouthKoreanCulture</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Korea" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Korea</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Sex" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Sex</span></a></p>