Taylor Swift must be kicking herself right now. Good thing she probably isn’t wearing cowboy boots. Though the country-aligned singer-songwriter’s 2012 was her year of going fully pop, she missed out on the opportunity to treat her former genre’s real-Amurika imagery as the Disneyland fantasy that it can be.
As ONTD points out, Korean pop singers 2YOON have grabbed the money Swift left on the table, and the resulting “24/7” video is as giddily irresistible as you’d hope. The group is made up of Gayoon and Jiyoon from 4minute, whose HyunaA scored one of SPIN’s 21 Greatest K-Pop Songs of All-Time. The song is characteristically hyper-melodic, electronic-based K-Pop (lots of “to the left, to the right”), but it has what sounds like a banjo, and the video is set at “Dream Village,” which looks to be a theme park of country-Western clichés.
The frisson of joy here comes from the wonderfully entertaining ways the video makers get familiar tropes “wrong,” from the skinny-jeaned farmhand to the cowboy wearing a metal ear-to-noise chain and bright-orange wifebeater. And, of course, the choreography! When all the instruments drop out for a melismatic vocal “whoa-oh-ooooh,” we’re certainly not in Kansas anymore.
It’s all proof of what fans have known since at least Patsy Cline: Country can go pop without ceasing to be “country.” As Magnetic Fields, another outsider to the genre, once crooned, “Your papa was a rodeo, too.”
