Have you ever seen the music video for Tomorrow by Together’s angsty track called ‘LO$ER=LO♡ER’? You know I really love TXT through and through to forgive a song with the chorus “lover with a dollar sign is a loser.” Despite my mixed feelings on the lyricism at play here, this happens to be one of my favorite kpop music videos, at least in terms of analysis. And why, you ask?

Because of this Where’s Waldo of a set right here:

Look at all those goddamn references!!! What a time!!!

Now this music video is pretty interesting at least in terms of plot (which may not be the purpose of this post but humor me). All the boys are doing their little shenanigans with their self-insert “y/n” faceless actresses. Except for Beomgyu, that is. Beomgyu isn’t allowed to have love. Instead he is berated by an abusive father on livestream. Theorists probably have a long winded explanation for this, but to tell you the truth, I don’t really care about kpop fictional universe lore. My point is that Beomgyu isn’t out and about like the other boys, he’s in his teenage rocker bedroom (until he wipes out on a bike and cries about it later but that’s not relevant right now).

Now, after watching Beomgyu play his acoustic guitar plenty, I have joked that someone should show him what a pedal does. I was stoked to see that there’s actually some pedals here!!! Maybe one day he will use one. One can only hope.

Anyway, there was no way I could resist scouring the frames of this music video to identify all the bands seen. Here are some annotated images from the music video in which I pointed out some of the set decoration that you may not be able to recognize or just read. I didn’t label oasis, for example, because that is the most legible logo there ever was. It’s almost too legible if you ask me.

When Beomgyu rips two of his posters off the wall, one of them is for John Lennon. Everyone give a round of applause!

A couple logos here I neglected to annotate. There’s the AC/DC beneath Def Leppard, the Rush logo above Fall Out Boy, and the James Brown logo above that. There’s also the Kinks up top.

The hardest logo to decipher here was the blue one beneath Linkin Park. Based on the shape I thought it might be the most compressed Dragonforce logo of all time, and after seeing another shot of it at a different angle, I’m confident that’s what it is. Which is hilarious. They just posted a Taylor Swift cover because they’re riding that hype train I guess.

Now this mirror is truly giving “bought a band sticker pack off amazon” to me. You know, the listings with a pack of like 200 stickers of pngs scalped off the internet. Do I think that a set designer was intentional enough to select each individual music artist as a shout-out or statement from the team? No. I am thinking that this employee did the reasonable thing and just went with what they could find. Which is cool. It’s free advertising for these artists regardless.

So I’m looking through the stickers and I see plenty bands. Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Motörhead… and then… De La Soul???? Was born three, Mase Dove and me, and that’s the magic number??? I guess Run DMC and Public Enemy are also hip hop groups and not rock bands, but I’m so used to seeing those logos plastered everywhere I turn that I didn’t think much of it. De La Soul, though? That’s not a reference I see everyday.

There’s some other stickers on the wall here. Notably there are some new inclusions such as Muse, The Smiths, Small Faces, Black Flag, the Bee Gees… and some Kaws figurines along with the worst gray Rubiks Cube of all time.

When trying to identify the prints on the wall, I recognized the top left one as David Bowie. I couldn’t find that exact picture though. Instead I found this one that prints are being sold of today.

There is also one that appears to be Brian May of Queen in an image similar to the following, but I couldn’t find the exact one used. Likewise, there is one that resembles Freddy Mercury when he had long hair that I haven’t found a match for either.

The rest of the prints and posters are the following (excluding the custom TXT ones):

In order to see if I could get any better shots of the set outside of the .2 second flashes in the music video, I checked out the behind the scenes. There’s a plot twist Arctic Monkeys poster, a band mentioned nowhere else in the room. I know the tumblr girls are shitting their pants over this one. There’s also some bonus Kings of Leon.

Blur, The Cure, Motorhead, the Beatles, Blondie, Arctic Monkeys, Slayer, Finger Eleven, AC/DC… the band selection here seems to be random. And then it gets even weirder.

The Hives?????????? That seems completely out of left field but okay. I must confess The Hives do have a ton of drip.

I mean just look at that! But anyway…

I also circled that little yellow thing because when I first saw it I thought it was Banned from DC and nearly screamed. But it’s not that, of course not. It’s actually a yellow hand snapping under a word that I can’t read due to blurriness. If I figure out what that is I’ll update this post.

AND HERE’S THAT UPDATE: It’s Stax Gold!

Stax Records is an American record company mostly known for its contributions to southern soul music, but it also released funk, R&B, and blues music. Their biggest star was Otis Redding, the King of Soul. Stax is essentially a company that famously represented a lot of innovative black artists and helped platform their work. I wonder how exactly this made it onto the set for TXT’s music video. It could be a staff member trying to pay tribute, or just a happy accident. Who knows?

That pretty much sums up Beomgyu’s bedroom set. There’s a whopping 42 bands/artists represented on this bedroom set alone. With the addition of TXT themselves, that makes 43.

There’s a few other references in this music video outside of Beomgyu’s scene that I’ll mention for the sake of completion. These are movie references, though, rather than musical ones. The first is the one everyone and their mother noticed.

The 2017 It movie includes a scene where one of the characters, Eddie, wears a cast just like the one Taehyun is seen wearing in the music video. It’s just like the “LO$ER=LO♡ER” title!

In the movie, a mean neighborhood girl named Gretta is the one who writes “LOSER” on Eddie’s cast. She even sticks her chewed up gum on it. I don’t recall someone adding the ‘v’ being shown on screen in the movie. Instead, in another scene it just appears changed. I’ve seen most people assume that it was one of the gang that corrected it off-screen. That seems pretty cute and so I choose to believe it to be true. According to Reddit, the “lover” thing isn’t included in the book, and I’ll just take Reddit’s word for it because that book is a whole can of worms.

The overall plot of It is about a group of children becoming friends as they try to defeat a curse looming over their town. It’s a horror movie, but the story depicts a pretty wholesome friendship.

The other movie reference is the ending.

It’s a reference to the movie Thelma & Louise, in which a pair of best friends decide to go on a weekend getaway to escape their shitty lives. Instead of a relaxing vacation though, they shoot a man in self defense after a sexual assault attempt and begin to live their lives on the run. Spoiler alert for the ending, but you should blame TXT, not me: the ending of the movie is left open ended with the girls fleeing the cops by driving off a cliff. We don’t see them crash to the ground or anything after that point.

These references both involve close friends trying to survive together in a world that is doing their best to take them down. Kind of similar to TXT’s video, but really it’s ambiguous as to what the threat to the boys is. I guess it’s just life.

For Beomgyu, it’s real shit like an abusive father. And I’ll even give Kai the benefit of the doubt, because he seems to be working a minimum wage job with a shitty boss. But as far as the others go, Taehyun’s only enemy is gravity after he fucks up a skateboard trick, Soobin and his girl commit a dine and dash, and Yeonjun is straight up robbing ATMs and committing crimes. I suppose it’s more about a world and system that drives you to do crime that is the problem, similar to in Thelma & Louise. But it’s not very similar to It, because that gang’s nemesis is just an evil clown deity.

Pennywise is likely an allegory for the terrors of childhood and oppression faced by children specifically, though, and TXT are all about youth, so there’s that. It seems the “enemy” in “LO$ER=LO♡ER” is multiple different systems of oppression and just our societal structure itself. Everyone is the enemy!

I’m not really here for that, though. Instead I’m here to spot Slayer stickers in my favorite kpop boy’s fictional bedroom. So I’ll leave it at that.

Stay tuned for when I eventually cover all of TXT’s stage outfits and shit for performing this song!