Story #14: Asparagus and K-pop
Curiosity, transitions and repeatable processes
I’ve had a windy career path, with seven careers so far. My first job was as a piano teacher; from there I studied chemistry1 and ending up in writing, with several detours along the way. Because of this, I’m often asked to give career talks to high school and university students. I still feel like the weirdo among doctors and lawyers, but I realize why I’m there: to show people it’s okay to change your mind. Also, that it’s okay if you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up. I’m still trying to figure it out.
When I give these talks, I'm invariably asked three questions. I’ll share the first two here and save the third for later.
First: How do you know you’re ready to jump to the next thing? My answer is that you’re never ready, but you create your own stepping stones such that you can hop or skip, rather leap. The fear is always there, but you learn to be brave in spite of it.
Second: How do you know what those stepping stones are? My answer is that you don’t, not at first. Something catches your eye and you follow it. Sometimes curiosity takes you where you expect, and more often, it takes you somewhere you didn’t even know existed. Follow enough curiosities and at some point they overlap to create something that is wholly your own.
With that in mind, this week I’m bringing two curiosities together: K-pop and Shirley Jackson, author of The Lottery, among other excellent short stories and novels. And that’s a Venn diagram I never thought I’d be drawing.
The story
K-pop is an expansive, weird thing to try to explain, so I’m not going to.2 For the purposes of our conversation, you need to know that performance—and specifically, digital performance, as in music videos—is an integral part of the K-pop experience. Accordingly, K-pop music videos are a THING. They’re typically high-budget, high-production videos featuring some combination of pyrotechnics, multiple and frequent scene changes, and synchronized choreography performed by beautiful people. The visuals complement the narrative that’s presented in the song—and often the videos stitch together to tell a bigger, overarching story.3
In other words, if you like multimedia storytelling that creates fireworks in your brain, you should watch K-pop music videos.
If you’re not familiar with K-pop, you might think it the purview of young Asian girls. I’m here to tell you that K-pop fans, especially ARMY, the moniker for BTS fans, are a diverse audience. I’m ARMY, for example, as is YouTuber Jordan Orme. He’s a professional video editor who explains how videos have been edited, whether it’s done well, and how that choice influences the narrative. He’s taught me so much about visual storytelling—it doesn’t hurt that closes each video with “dance therapy,” which is basically him doing dorky dances in his living room. It’s tremendously endearing.
Among the many things I’ve learned from Orme is the idea of match cuts. Match cuts are the equivalent of a writer’s “however” or “consequently”—they create transitions.4
Plot
One type of match cut is to shift from one scene to another—to advance the plot without unnecessary expository details. Consider Agust D’s Daechwita. Agust D is the alter ego and solo performance name of Suga, one of the rappers from BTS. Notice how at 1:43, the mad king makes a slicing motion across his throat. The video editor matches that motion and body position to transport us from the palace concourse onto a balcony, effectively matching and cutting directly into the next scene.
Theme
You can also play with thematic match cuts, like this one from Serendipity, a solo track from BTS’s Jimin. The song is about the serendipity of meeting someone you fall in love with. At 0:59, he nudges the yellow ball; then there’s an eclipse and boof! a giant yellow ball enters his room. The “match” here is in the repetition of round objects, the sequence of which symbolize the deeper meaning of the song: that a serendipitous encounter (the eclipse, which is an unexpected alignment of two heavenly bodies) can change the ordinary (the small yellow ball) into something extraordinary (the giant yellow ball).
Bonus BTS swagger
And while we’re hanging out with BTS, we can also look at match cuts made for pure swagger. Check out this snippet from the outro of DNA, which is ostensibly a single dance sequence told over four different sets, all stitched together with match cuts.5
Once I learned about match cuts, I started seeing them everywhere. In BTS music videos. In other music videos. In movies. In TV shows.
And I ended up where I always end up: What is the equivalent thing in writing?
Until last month, when I read Shirley Jackson’s essay Notes for a Young Writer. She says:
Now look at this device: "'I hate fresh asparagus,' she said to her kitchen clock, and found herself saying it again ten minutes later to Mrs. Butler in the grocery; 'I hate fresh asparagus,' she said, 'it always takes so long to cook.'"
Cue brain fireworks. That is the writing equivalent of a match cut.
Why it works
After sharing her asparagus example, Jackson continues:
…your reader, being a common-sense type, no doubt assumes that before the remark about asparagus your heroine and Mrs. Butler said good morning my aren't you out early and isn't that a charming hat. Your reader may also assume, if he is perceptive, that your heroine in some fashion turned away from her kitchen clock, got her hat and coat on, picked up her pocket-book, forgot her shopping list, and in some fashion either walked or drove or bicycled to the store. She is there, she is in the middle of a conversation with Mrs. Butler; not ten words ago she was at home talking to the clock. The transition has been relatively painless; your reader has been required to read only one sentence and get around one semicolon, and the asparagus remark has been repeated simply to tie together the two halves of the sentence.
In other words, the asparagus device allows you to skip over mundane details and get on with the story, not unlike the match cut in the Daechwita video. In writing, it also allows you to draw attention to the detail you’ll use as a hinge to connect the before and after scenes.
What we can learn from it
I said at the top of this newsletter that when I give career talks, I’m asked three questions. I’ve covered the first two, and I’ll share the third here, which is: How did you manage to change careers so many times?
The answer is that if you’ve done it before, you can do it again—and if you want to be smart about it, each time is an opportunity to do it better. In other words, you can take what seems like random detours and transform them into a repeatable process.
Let’s take a small detour
Allow me to digress and tell you how I learned to listen to music. In 2017, I discovered the podcast Switched On Pop, and it changed my life.6 It never occurred to me to apply music theory to pop music. I binge-listened to it and learned to listen like the hosts did. One day, about six months later, I realized I was listening to the radio differently. Somehow, I’d synthesized what I’d learned and was now applying it. And now, three and a half years later, I’ve developed a certain style of listening and I’m writing about what I hear.
One key to really listening to music is repeat listens. Since most songs are short, it’s pretty easy. I’m prone to putting one song on infinite repeat. I’ll listen to it over and over again—sometimes for weeks!—and let it get under my skin. And suddenly, like magic, I’ll hear something new that clarifies my understanding of what the artist or songwriter is trying to do.
And back to our regularly scheduled programming
Going back to repeatable processes, what can I extract from my experience of learning how to listen to music? First, there’s the psychological aspect. Doing something new means accepting that it’s going to feel uncomfortable. But we push on, and we find reliable experts whom we can learn from. We follow them step by step, practicing the skill the way they do. We keep doing it until one day, we see something for ourselves. And we continue practicing until we don’t just see what those experts see, but also the things that we see. In this way, we evolve from being a complete amateur to achieving competence, and finally, maybe, mastery.
I’m pretty good at close listening. But when it comes to close reading and writing technique, I feel like a complete amateur. I may be a professional writer, but I'm a self-taught one. I’m okay with close readings of non-fiction, but fiction? I know enough to realize I’m missing at least half the story, but I don’t know enough to remedy the situation.
But I’m doing it anyway, and right now, I’m hanging out with Shirley Jackson. She writes short stories, which are the pop song equivalent of fiction—not in the sense that they shouldn’t be taken seriously (which is an entirely other conversation about what we deem important and not, and the assumptions that get folded into those judgments), but in the sense that they’re, well, short. I’m supplementing my own reading with critical and historical analyses of her work. I’m bouncing between what the experts read and what I read, and importantly, I’m reading her stories over and over.
And slowly but surely, I’m getting somewhere. On my first read of Jackson’s Notes for a Young Writer, I thought the asparagus scene was clever. On my second read I noticed its elegance and word economy, and on the third I connected it to what I already knew about match cuts. It feels really satisfying to uncover more detail on each read, just like it’s satisfying to hear new details when I listen to a song for the hundredth time. And it feels immensely satisfying to be able to connect a visual technique to a literary technique.
As I flex my close reading muscles, I expect that these a-ha moments will happen more frequently. And I like the sound of that.
Did you like this? Share with a friend. Did you hate it? Share with an enemy.7
I have a visceral memory of talking to my grad school supervisor, who asked, “So, do you think you’d like to stay on for your Ph.D.?” I almost vomited. I took that as a sign I should do something else.
In this episode of Switched On Pop, Dr. Suk-Young Kim, Professor of Critical Studies and the Director of the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA, explains her five tenets of K-pop: kaleidoscopic (making liberal use of multimedia performance), keyboard (a digital-first experience, rather than one based on live performance), kleenex (disposable), ketchup (predictable) and korporate (a varnished product designed to be globally profitable).
I think that’s a decent starting point, even if it gives short shrift to groups like BTS, who make considerable contributions to their work, are anything but disposable and strive to a greater purpose than just financial profit. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Many K-pop groups incorporate a fictional background story that’s explored through their music videos, which becomes the focus of fan theories. It’s a way for fans to interact with the group on a deeper level—as well as with each other, as they interpret and debate the meaning behind the intricate storylines. Conveniently, those interactions also generate significant social buzz, not to mention revenue as fans buy chapbooks, graphic novels or bespoke merchandise.
The footwork in that dance sequence, plus the clothes, plus the match cuts, make my brain light up with fireworks. For a summer, I was obsessed with DNA fashion, especially Jimin’s sequined bomber jacket and J-Hope’s rainbow tiger sweater.
I mean this literally. Discovering Switched On Pop allowed me to reconnect with the part of myself that loves music. I have always found solace and inspiration in music, but that part of me got lost in the chaos of becoming a parent. Rediscovering music has been catalytic in getting to know my post-partum self, which is a big topic for another time.
This text borrowed and modified from Dan Nelken’s excellent newsletter for creatives.