During last week’s meeting, we wrapped up our discussion of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart by listening through and analyzing the lyrics of two albums from Japanese Breakfast, the band of which Zauner is the lead singer and songwriter.
Psychopomp is an album that Zauner wrote shortly after her mother’s death from cancer. She described it as an attempt to unpack her feelings about the six months after her mother’s diagnosis, referring to what she experienced while taking care of her and the aftermath of her death in the lyrics to some of the songs. One song that stood out in our discussion was “Everybody Wants to Love You,” particularly because of the music video which depicts Zauner in a hanbok and gache (a traditional Korean dress and wig) as she partied and drank on the streets. We interpreted the music video as relating to Zauner’s biracial identity; the hanbok and gache evoke the image of the ideal woman according to Korean Confucian ethics which values chastity, modesty, and filial piety, all of which contrasts with the wild and carefree actions of a typical American youth.
Figure 1. Michelle Zauner dressed in the hanbok and gache in “Everyone Wants to Love You” music video.
Another observation on the direction of the music video was paralleled with the histories of Asian American women being either exotified or presumed to be prostitutes as a result of the Page Act (1875) and Gentleman’s Agreement (1907). Although these acts of legislation were concerned with the exclusion of Chinese and the inclusion of Japanese, respective to the aforementioned laws, eventually with Korea being imperialized by Japan around 1910, Korean women were a part of the picture brides that came to the US (as a result of Gentleman’s Agreement). Even though the Gentleman’s Agreement was supposed to abolish any discriminatory sentiment toward Japanese/Korean women, the racialization of Asian American women resulted in the continual discriminatory practices and/or exotification of Asian American women. In other words, in the case of Korean immigrants who came here as picture brides, they were exotified, sexualized, objectified, and/or vilified by both Japan and the US. In the context of this history, then, Zauner’s music video, “Everybody Want to Love You,” juxtaposes its lyricism and optimism with its morbid implications in the lyrics and direction of the music video to suggest how Korean American women like Zauner are still treated as prostitutes. Moreover, with Zauner’s biracial identity, the stark contrast between her “whiteness” and the Korean attire she was wearing, Zauner seems to be commentating on how she continues to be exotified despite not “looking the part.” In fact, it is her “exotic” biracial identity that makes it so that “everybody wants to love [her].”
Figure 2.Members of a Congressional committee look over passports of Japanese 'picture brides' at the immigration station of Angel Island, circa 1920. (Source: https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/gentlemens-agreement)
The second album we listened to was Soft Sounds from Another Planet. In an interview with Dead Oceans, Zauner describes the songs to be about human resilience and written to help her leave her trauma behind. Many of the songs on the album were related to her own past relationships, but we interpreted the lyrics of “The Body is a Blade” to be about her grief from losing her mother. The original title of this song was “My Mommy is Sick” and was written and released on an earlier album while Zauner’s mother was undergoing cancer treatment. The music video for this song also included various photos of her mother and Zauner as a child. The lyrics of “This House” also came up in our discussion as being about her father who she became estranged from after her mother’s death. We speculated that it could have been about her father’s unhealthy habits in coping with his wife’s illness and her worries that her father would become a stranger to her in the future, which is a concern that she also voiced in Crying in H Mart.
This coming Friday, we will be reading and discussing Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racializations to learn about relational racialization and its relevance to Asian American studies. To check out what we’ll be reading feel free to check out our meeting-resources channel. Otherwise, feel free to come to stop by and learn more about it!
Resources:
About the Band:
Japanese Breakfast is an indie pop band headed by Korean-American musician Michelle Zauner.
Zauner started the band as a side project in 2013, when she was leading the Philadelphia-based emo group Little Big League. She has said that she named the band after seeing a GIF of Japanese breakfast and deciding that the term would be considered "exotic" to Americans; she also thought it would make others wonder what a Japanese breakfast consists of.
In 2014, she returned to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon, to care for her ailing mother. She continued to record music and songs, first to cope with stress, then, after her mother died, with grief. The songs eventually became Japanese Breakfast's debut studio album: Psychopomp (2016), released by Yellow K Records. Its critical and commercial success led Japanese Breakfast to sign with the record label Dead Oceans, which released the band's second and third studio albums: Soft Sounds From Another Planet (2017) and Jubilee (2021). Jubilee was nominated for Best Alternative Music Album and Japanese Breakfast for Best New Artist at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards and became the band's first album to chart on the Billboard 200, where it peaked at 56.
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