Coupdetat

A Sampling of Substance: Philosophy and Revolution in G-Dragon's Coup d'etat

By @Dutchesskpop

Introduction (skip if you are familiar with the background)

Coup d’état headlined G-Dragon’s eponymous album and marked the height of a prodigiously
productive period for the superstar. In 2012-13, G-Dragon released Alive and completed a world
tour with BIGBANG and released two solo albums: One of a Kind (2012) and Coup d’état (2013)
and also did a solo world tour.

The music video for Coup d’état therefore represents an artist in deft control of his output, voice,
and artistic vision. In the ‘making’ film for the music video, G-Dragon says he wanted this video
to be ‘more like an art film’. The music video for Coup d’état was filmed on the 21st and 22nd
of August 2013 and released on the 2nd of September the same year. The video was shot at
the Kikori Art Centre, where elaborate sets were erected to film the various stories in the video.
None of the effects in the video are entirely CGI.

Methodology (Skip if you just want to read the commentary.)

The multi-layered wordplay that GD and TOP use in their lyrical output is perhaps only fully
accessible to a fluent Korean speaker. So, in this analysis, I will refer to the text in only the
most literal and direct way it correlates to the visual narrative. One fascinating feature of the
‘mature’ Bigbang output (products after Alive) is the non-literal interpretations of the textual
narratives in the visual realm. Sometimes, the text and imagery loosely intertwine, at others they
are diametrically opposed to each other to create a metanarrative that is quite different from
either. Their music videos therefore become a rich visual mine for both meaning and reference,
and I thus read them as a considered, authored work BY the artists. GD revealed in his interview
during the 'making' of the MV that he wanted to redefine the concept of coup d'etat through the
video (which usually refers to forced regime change), ‘by thinking out of the box’.

Commentary

This music video has a colour scheme of white, black, and red. It is shot as a game of hide and
seek, with seeking and hiding, seeing and being blinded being twin themes that run through the
narrative structure.
The song opens with a sample of a poem by Gilbert Scott-Heron: ‘The revolution will not be
televised’. Critics consider Scott-Heron to be the original rapper, and the use of his words to
start G-Dragon’s own coup d’état is particularly meaningful, in ways that are illustrated more in
the visual language of the music video than they are in the text of the lyrics. Scott-Heron’s words
are spoken over an old man in a loin cloth imprisoned in a dusty wasteland. We know the old
man is GD because of the tattoos on his skin. He gropes in the rubble to pick up a stone.

The next scene opens in a vortex of metal, above which hovers a wrecking ball. It is the
Damocles’ sword of Time, a pendulum that swings ever closer. Below it stands the artist—young,
beautiful and alone. In his ear he wears a clef earring—his music remains, as does his ear for it,
and music will be the key to his liberation. **

This scene draws from two major visual influences that inform this video: the gothic horror of
Edgar Allan Poe, especially as illustrated by Harry Clarke in the 1919 reprint of Tales of Mystery
and Imagination, and the Dark Knight comics of the DC universe.* The metal vortex in which GD
finds himself is visually like the Pit, Ras Al Ghoul’s prison. Conceptually, the Pit and the Pendulum
represent the psychological torture of Poe’s eponymous story.
 Dark Knight mythology about the loneliness of Bruce Wayne’s childhood after the murder of
his parents is referenced again when we see a small boy standing in front of a cenotaph with a
red-gloved hand. The child has this blood-stained hand to his heart, in which he holds a ruddy
pebble. Whether he is taking out or putting back his heart remains to be seen.
The boy grows up to become the triumphant artist-- we see the visual link in the form of the
single red glove again. We see that the heart had been taken out in childhood—in its place is a
ruddy, never-healing wound. This could well be a reference to GD’s own career as a child star and
his long years as a trainee for which his childhood was sacrificed, but from which grave rose the
monumental superstar.
Women in red, veiled, and mysterious, hide in a forest of bones (again reminiscent of the white
candles in The Pit and the Pendulum). The protagonist makes no attempt to contact them.
Instead this is a direct reference to the hide and seek game that is referenced in the lyrics—
hide well so I do not see your hair—a Korean rhyme sung by children at play which is referenced
frequently to invoke both childhood and innocence in K-drama, and their perversion when
invoked in the horror genre. More recently, fans might remember its inclusion in Mino’s Fiancé.

In Coup d’état, the roles of seeker and sought, powerless and powerful, revolutionary and
oppressor, black and white, become fraught, liminal, and interchangeable. These roles switch,
and so we realise that this coup d’état is not a simple call to arms and revolution. It is not a
revolution that will topple regimes. What is it and where does it occur?

The lyrics refer to the protagonist as a ‘gorilla’ who steals women’s hearts—even as a gaping
hole opens in his own chest in the video. The camera pans into this hole and space double in on
itself as GD’s own face appears in this window.
The artist looks out through the grimy glass of an old-fashioned ticket booth. The headlines
acts on the ticket booth are the names of GD’s past albums—Shine a Light and One of a Kind.
Where is Heartbreaker? It should be on the very front of the booth, but that name has been
effaced, in its place, scuffed blankness. We may have, but GD has not forgotten the controversy
and backlash that attached to this work. It will forever sully his memory of it. Artists, it turns out,
DON’T move on from our attacks on them even after we have moved on to our next target. Our
brutal handiwork, our defacement of their work, remains in their memories and hearts.
Even as the lyrics offer a brag rap about how others will not be as famous as GD is, how easily
and how much money he makes, in the video he is a captive inside this derelict ticket window, a
prisoner in a glass cage. The women from the forest are shadowy wraiths now, beating upon the
glass to be let in. They are us.
 As we see the idol though the small window of his public persona and glib marketing
statements, we fetishise and crave him, wishing to break down the barriers that keep his person
away from us. He hides, a captive of the very fame he seems to be bragging about in the
lyrics, alone with his music and loneliness. The glass box motif is repeated often in BIGBANG
videos— it seems the fear and fascination of forever being on display is a very self-conscious
preoccupation for them.
The video continues to intersperse the pit and pendulum imagery with the other scenes. The
ominous presence of time foreshadows the narrative. The scene changes to G-Dragon in black
and white lying at the base of a knotted white tree. This could be Yggdrasil, the Norse Tree of
Life, or its referential child, the White Tree of Gondor from the Lord of the Rings. The tree is
leafless, its fruit poisonous and grotesque, eaten by worms and unseen dreadful creatures.

Apples are a repeated motif that GD utilises in many of his works, beginning with his first album,
Heartbreaker (2009) where he first took a bite of the forbidden fruit. The Biblical references are
direct and unsubtle, as they are meant to be. But the apples in Coup d’état are no longer fresh
and inviting as they were in Heartbreaker.
 They have become ominous, like the shrunken skulls from the Mummy movies (which in turn
were inspired by the tsantsa of the Jivaro people of south America). Now the apples, though
numerous, are rotted; the tree of life is dead. This theme will continue in his oeuvre, culminating
in an even more intimate examination of dreams and their poisoned, Monkey’s Paw fruition in
Kwon Ji Yong (2017).
Who is GD here? Is he the interloper Steward or the returning King? We do not know. He is hero
and villain, shadow and light, as yet unknowing of his true nature. He is us.

The poison tree leads us to a kitchen/laundry/ workshop, mixing studio where revolutionary
money with the Coup d’état sigil--that will later become the famous Peaceminusone logo--is
being cooked up in giant pots. GD’s music, by an alchemical process, transforms sound into
money. The small tattoo of the dollar sign on the inside of finger emphasises the message.
Meanwhile, the lyrics reference Hong Kil Dong, a hero who fights political and social oppression
and a legendary figure in Korean cultural narrative. This, as far as I can tell, remains the sole
reference to political revolution in the song.
Yet, everything is not new and shiny and hopeful as it seems in the lyrics. The video shows a
greenroom that is decrepit and falling apart, with the great wrecking ball of time having already
destroyed one wall. The artist sits in the foreground, tied to a chair, a captive of the smoke
and mirrors, the greasepaint, and the unceasing attention, surrounded by the sordid detritus
of broken vanity mirrors and discarded costumes. The scene reveals the ephemeral nature of
fame, beauty, and youth, as all the devices used to create the show of show business decay
away like a Daniel Arsham installation.
Now we see that the makeup chair is no different from an electric chair, with cables snaking
through the water on the floor. This imagery of the chair as torture device will be brought to a
visual climax in the music video for GD &TOP’s Zutter from the Made series a couple of years
later. The lyrics reference both dogs and their barking, which is an exact soundbite reproduced
four years later in Bullshit in Kwon Ji Yong . With these repeated motifs-- lyrical, aural and visual--
we see that GD sees his oeuvre as a continuous work rather than as discrete units, which also
allow the works to be seen as a cumulative philosophy and thus all the more fascinating for a
critic to read and study.
In this MV, GD also uses two artworks by the New York street artist Harif Guzman (tag Haculla),
which repeat the white on black and black on white themes of the video. The works illustrate
GD—his eyes and his wall of masks—and frame the rapid narrative transition from the seeker to
the sought, from the blind to the seeing, from black to white and white to black. From an image
where all but his eyes are obscured in the balaclava, to its negative where all is hidden but his
eyes.

Then GD is a king in black and white, sitting at a long table that resembles a crucifix laid on its
side. This is an enthronement, but it is also a crucifixion, with the blind, unseeing media reporters
harassing him from all sides. The scene switches to him laying in a spatter of paint on a canvas
—the planes shift and merge—he diminishes from three dimensions to two, becomes an
installation, art, something only to be seen, unreal, unalive-- a murder of crows. The imagery of
the raven from Poe and Gaugin appears again, foreshadowing and ominous. The poor artist lies
dead, exhausted from being simultaneously made and destroyed by the media.
The masks from Heartbreaker make an appearance as an endless room full of his likenesses.
In this reality there are nothing but masks; everyone wears one. Those that copy him, those that
hide from him, and that which he hides himself. At the climax, something breaks, and tears flow
out from some of the masks, spilling out on those beneath, destroying the homogeneity and
apparent perfection of this world.
 Finally, the artist removes the mask, and crushes it in his hand, revealing a new person
underneath. The true self emerges, a direct and dramatic contrast from the conforming,
homogenous masked self. The emphatic blackness of the true self seeps through from behind
the masks and lies in a glistening puddle on the pallid canvas like dark amniotic fluid. The
artistic self is victorious, confrontational, gold-toothed, and chants something inaudible for the
viewer. (I have never managed to decipher what he says. Perhaps you will have better luck, but I
do think the illegibility is intentional here.)
As the wrecking ball pendulum descends further into the pit, it threatens the artist. The passage
of time brings age, loss of beauty, disease, and that which is worse than death to an artist,
irrelevance. The pendulum comes closer and closer; it cannot be kept away. The artist screams
in rage and frustration, or is it his liberation and rebirth?

The scene shifts to a desolate desert, where the skeleton of a vast red, giant lies half-buried in
the ground, its head crushed by the pendulum of Time—an inevitable fate, it seems, for any artist,
any celebrity, no matter how big. This is Ozymandius, this is Stalin, Hussein-- every larger than life
figure brought down by time and fate.

Finally, the slave from the opening scene picks up the rock--is this the sacrificed heart of the
little boy? --and prepares to throw it at his prison walls. Meanwhile, the young artist examines
the fallen Titan and stands on his smashed skull. The philosophical realisation here is profound
— that the search for eternal youth and relevance is a fruitless one, and all things must and will
end. With this realisation, the artist sloughs off the dirt and dullness of age, and emerges anew…
By letting go, he has found the secret to his emancipation. In this internal revolution, the artist is
thus able to throw off the fear of ageing, the fear of irrelevance, the fear of being forgotten and,
finally, he is free.
As Scott-Heron said in the opening sample—the revolution is in the mind. The coup d’état,
therefore, is entire personal. It is MY coup d’état, the renewal of the person from inside out. A
revolution that cannot be televised because it is entirely internal and invisible to the outside
world.

From the dust of the fallen prison walls emerges a new revolutionary self. This time the artist is
in red and is both seeker and sought simultaneously. GD stares into camera, the billowing red
flags of revolution planted behind him.
This is the red blood of desire, impetuosity, rage, lust, anger, envy, jealousy—in fact, the entire
gamut of human emotions. Despite the intellectual breakthrough, the base business of humanity
within the artist—and us—remains. This is Peace Minus One, always a smidgen away from
perfection, where only one raised finger separates the profound from the profane.
* The Christopher Nolan directed movie version of the character ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ released
in 2012, and several visual and narrative elements from this retelling are referenced in the video.

** Clef is ‘key’ in French.

All images courtesy YG Entertainment unless otherwise specified.

Harry Clarke illustrations from Wikimedia Commons.
Lord of the Ring still courtesy Wingnut films.
The Dark Knight Rises still courtesy Warner Bros, DC Entertainment.