“Pleasure Shop” by Key, Sunday, October 20, 2024
Since Key’s 2021 EP Bad Love, The SHINee singer has been creating dark pop with nostalgic ‘80s and ‘90s sci-fi motifs. The singer’s latest installment came last month with his third mini album Pleasure Shop. In the EP’s eponymous lead single, Key takes on the form of a cyborg, inviting futuristic humans to come “deeper into” a store filled with unique things to give a person pleasure. The cyborg invites the humans “pleasure juice,” which gives them a kind of euphoria. Kim Ki-bum conceptualized the mini album when thinking about a dystopian future. He asked the question giving a press statement just before the EP’s release: “What if I uploaded myself, turned it into an AI program and had an argument with my AI version? How scary would it be if that AI version of me was better than the real me?”
YOU’RE WELCOME. Entering the eerie “Pleasure Shop” Key has opened for listeners draws an uncanny similarity to a line from the 1973 spooky musical classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which two newly engaged lovers breakdown in front of a house occupied by Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a “sweet transvestite from the planet Tansexual in the galaxy of Transylvania.” When lovers Brad and Janet wander into the house, Frank-N-Furter beckons the lovers: “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure.” The invitation isn‘t dissimilar from the cyborg in “Pleasure Shop” who invites customers to “surrender to me.” The pleasure offered in Key’s latest single isn’t overtly sexual—it’s essentially asexual, void of any feelings of reciprocation. What is left is for the user to use or pervert in any way that person chooses.
I’M HAPPY WHEN YOU’RE HAPPY. It seems that movies,books, and culture have programmed us against the ideas of utopia. We often get uncomfortable with the promise of pleasure because we are always thinking about ulterior motives. That’s what makes Key’s “Pleasure Shop” creepy. Can we trust the emotionless shopkeeper? And while the program may be emotionless, we begin to worry who is behind the code and collecting our data and what that party will do with that information. The worry is that AI will replace human workers. Human jobs are the casualty of every revolution; however, revolution creates new jobs for humans to fill. The 1950s didn’t eliminate housework. Blacksmiths were traded for auto mechanics. We may have had fantasies as kids about robots doing all of our chores, but what does that mean when a person’s income requires labor? Do we become managers of the robots or merely in their way? Or is the future far bleaker?
Read the English translation on Genius.
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