IU’s Evocative “Love Wins All” Music Video (featuring V) is Thought-Provoking

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
January 23, 2024

The K-pop idol and actress IU released her latest single “Love Wins All” earlier today. Beautifully poetic and distinctly sad, the song has a searing chorus that tells the kind of love story that you know will end in despair: “Run away from the world / Go to the end with me.”

The accompanying music video plays more like a short film than the usual K-pop accompaniment. At just 5-minutes 23-seconds, the tone is set early on. A young woman and her boyfriend (portrayed by BTS vocalist V) are running away from something sinister, which appears to be a gigantic floating cube. And while that might sound ridiculous, IU and V absolutely sell the storyline with their acting — so much so that you will feel their fear.

Their faces are bloodied and their clothes are torn. And when they escape into an abandoned building hoping to find shelter from whatever it is that’s chasing them, they stare off at a mountain of discarded clothing that towers over them.

At this point, I immediately knew that death was imminent.

A very similar imagery was reflected in BTS’ video for “Spring Day” — a song so good that it was selected as one of Rolling Stone’s The 100 Greatest Songs in the History of Korean Pop Music list. [FULL DISCLOSURE: I wrote that review.] It ranked at the No. 4 spot:

A timeless meditation on friendship, sorrow, and regret, “Spring Day” is a brilliant example of BTS’ unique ability to sum up complex emotions into universal pop songs. The soaring 2017 power ballad is full of lush vocals and soulful rapping, as the group movingly evokes powerful feelings of loss, memory, and hope for the future: “The morning will come again/Because no darkness or no season can last forever,” they sing. Widely understood as a tribute to the predominantly teenage passengers who drowned in the Sewol Ferry disaster of 2014, “Spring Day” creates powerful art out of deep desolation and remains arguably the most beloved song in the group’s rich catalog.

In 2018, I wrote an essay for Rolling Stone that included a paragraph alluding to BTS and how they were affected by the Sewol tragedy:

For BTS and their fans, acts of generosity often bear a political message. After the Sewol Ferry sank off the coast of South Korea in April 2014, killing almost 300 teenage students, Korea’s politicians tried to distance themselves from the tragedy. Grieving parents participated in hunger strikes, while conservative supporters of then-President Park Geun-Hye downplayed the deaths, saying it was time to put the calamity behind them. Reports later exposed a government-sanctioned blacklist of celebrities who appeared to criticize Park’s regime; while BTS were likely unaware of this, they demonstrated which side they supported by donating $100,000 to benefit the victims’ families.

At the time, I tried to get confirmation from their management that the song was an ode to the Sewol victims. But since no one would go on record, I left that bit out of the piece. Though BTS has never come out and stated that “Spring Day” is about the victims, they implied it in a 2020 Esquire cover story.

“Spring Day” itself is a beautiful composition, but the video for it is ethereal and intoxicating. One of the most powerful scenes depicts Suga sitting atop a pile of discarded clothes.

The mountain of clothes depicted in both music videos appear to be a homage to Christian Boltanski’s 2010 installation No Man’s Land, which was exhibited at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

In an interview with Art in America, Boltanski explained the significance of the mound of clothing in his exhibit.

“It’s used clothing. I’ve always imagined that used clothing and a photo of somebody and a dead body are nearly the same. They’re all objects related to the missing person. On the floor there are mostly coats, which more clearly take the form of people. On the ‘mountain’ are other types of clothing that are all mixed up. You can’t imagine these people. There is no more individuality.”

For a few brief moments, the protagonists in “Love Wins All” are left to rejoice in an imaginary world in which she’s not deaf and he is not partially blind. Through a beat-up camcorder, they see themselves as how they used to be before they got trapped in this dystopian hell. She’s a beautiful bride in a gorgeous white wedding gown and he’s a dashing groom nibbling on petit fours. Only the pictures they print out in the photo booth reveal their true selves, garbed in soiled finery with faces that are bruised and haggard.

But it’s the last 90 seconds of the video that absolutely broke me. That it takes place in front of that mountain of clothes warned me of the impending tragedy. Even as they knew they had moments to live, she — in an act of love — covers his eye to spare him from witnessing the horrors that will befall them. As the vocals reach a crescendo (“Two of us, side by side / Gone astray on purpose / Crush me in your arms / … Our love wins”), he cries.

Through the camcorder’s viewfinder, our last shot is of them being taken by whatever has been chasing them — presumably that floating cube. And when the garments they were wearing flutter down, landing atop the mountain of clothes, we know that they are dead.

It’s not easy for two well-known celebrities to immerse themselves in their roles so well that we don’t see them, but rather their characters. But watching this, I didn’t see pop stars IU and V, but rather a pair of anguished characters who were trying desperately to survive in this post-apocalyptic inferno.

END NOTE: I know that this music video was filmed before V enlisted for mandatory military duty on December 11, and well before Lee Sun-kyun’s tragic death on December 27. But seeing IU use sign language in this video brought back memories of her role in “My Mister” — where she starred opposite Lee. Though she didn’t portray a deaf character in that K-drama, she was the caretaker for her deaf grandmother. The combination of all these elements and memories made this video that much more impactful.

Credit should also be given to director Um Tae-hwa, who helmed this project. His latest film “Concrete Utopia” — starring Lee Byung-hun — was selected as the South Korean entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards. (It did not make the shortlist.)

Honestly, this music video has more emotional content than most films I’ve watched over the past few months. It is a must-see.

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