Review: Jay Park–“Girlfriend”

Jay Park woos a girl via his skills at singing, dancing, and stalking.


Did you like the song?
I guess Jay Park’s recent MVs just aren’t my thing. As with his song “Demon,” I wasn’t feeling this song (although I did enjoy this one more than “Demon” because we got to hear Jay rapping more, and his raps are awesome). I mainly didn’t like the chorus, which is repetitive and a little dull. But I admit I liked the song better when I heard it all in one go—you know, like an actual song—than in the way it was in pieces in the music video. The gaps between sections of the song bothered me, as always. I don’t know how I’m going to handle T-ARA’s upcoming music video “Cry, Cry,” which is apparently 30 minutes long, when I can’t even enjoy stuff like this.

Jay Park.
What was your favorite part of the song?
Definitely the raps, and this is consistent with most of Jay’s songs. In my opinion, he needs to focus on the choruses of future songs so that they’re more fast-paced to match the energy of his rapping in the verses.

Does the English make you want to rip your eardrums out?
Of course not, Jay’s a native speaker. Also, he gets massive “aww” points for having the (Korean) line “In my dream, it’s you / I learned Korean in order to talk to you.” Isn’t that adorable?

Did you like the video?
The visual quality of the video is excellent, and I didn’t get that impression from “Demon,” so that’s a good start. However, just as the song drastically changes its tone during the chorus, the video switches from one concept to another, and unfortunately none of them go particularly well together, in my opinion. The strongest concept was similar to Park Seong Min’s “Beautiful Girl” (they both even take their girlfriends to amusement parks!), but “Beautiful Girl” maintained the same tone throughout, whereas “Girlfriend” shuffles between a few.

On the other hand, it can’t be denied that if fans wanted a glimpse at Jay’s “softer side,” they got that here, albeit broken up a bit. Jay’s nervousness and subsequent relief that she’s okay with the little shrine of pictures he set up was quite sweet, a very natural side of him, and my favorite moment of the video.

Was there a storyline? If so, did it make sense?
This music video features stuff like this:

In short, the stalker files.
When most people see that, what do they expect? Crazed fangirls. A horror film, a creepy paparazzi tale, psycho stalkers with knives, serial killers, kidnappings…you get the idea. But when Jay Park does these things, here’s what we can expect:


I know. No fangirl wants to see this. But they are really cute together.
You know, most idols would shy away from showing an actual kiss in their music videos for fear of endangering the girl’s life making fans feel jealous, so I applaud Jay for having the balls to show this. All right, it worked. I’m jealous.

So this is your standard plot, with a few twists: Boy meets Girl…

Look, she’s even labeled and everything.
Boy is socially awkward but good at singing and dancing so he stalks Girl until he gets a chance to show her what a good singer and dancer he is…

To be fair, with those moves, who wouldn’t want to date him?
Boy takes Girl to an amusement park and then shows her the creepy wall of photos he took…

I guess he keeps them at the carnival? Does he live there? Is he a secret carny?!
And instead of being horrified and running away screaming, Girl is touched by his sweet gesture.

This is the exact opposite of what my expression would be in this situation.
Then they ride off into the sunset in Boy’s BMW. Moral of the story: if you’re Jay Park, you can pretty much do anything and still get girls to like you.

Was the dance cool and distinctive?
There’s no dance specifically for this video, but that’s okay because there’s a shameless dance break in the middle of the video for no particular reason except to give Jay a chance to impress everybody. And, yeah, it’s damn impressive. There’s a reason he’s up for Best Solo Dance Performance at the 2011 Mnet Asian Music Awards. (You can vote here.)

Do the members look good?
They look adorable, and what’s more is they look adorable together. A great couple (ignoring the stalker thing at the beginning).

Jay’s facepalm.
Which member stood out the most?
I’m going to have to give this to Jay and his tattoos. (Wow, did you know he had so many now?! Like, seriously, how many does he have?)


He’s unexpectedly sweet in this music video.
Do you like it enough to buy the song?
No, I’m sorry…

Any ending thoughts?
I hate to say I disapprove of this concept, because it’s nice to see different sides of artists now and again. But the fact remains that in a Jay Park music video, he’s just too good of a dancer to not have some kind of dance in there. So they had to fit that in somehow, and the result was breaking up both the song and the video. However, I can’t see any perfect alternative with this song and concept.

Boyfriend’s one-liner:
“Ah, hobbies. We all have one. Some collect hockey cards, others collect stamps, and then some people like to take hundreds of pictures of the same girl and put them up on their wall.”

Thanks to the Jaywalkerz who wanted me to review this MV. Please comment, subscribe and request a review if you’d like. :)