While I normally try to link to official music videos whenever possible, today is an exception—because the music video for T-ara’s Day By Day is fucking 16 minutes long, and no one has time for that. I’ve linked to a dance version, which also doesn’t even start the song until a minute into the goddamn thing.
If you don’t care about spending a quarter of an hour watching a music video for a song that isn’t named Thriller, here it is.
The music video was directed by Cha Eun Taek, an award-winning director who was also behind the highly-acclaimed videos for Big Bang’s Lies and Lee Hyori’s U-Go-Girl, among many others. As a more dubious achievement, he would later become implicated in South Korea’s 2016 political scandal as part of the shadowy cult of soft power that actually controlled the government.
This Mad Max-inspired music video is also notable for introducing fans to Dani, who was set to be the next member of T-ara. (She’s the one sitting on the back of the motorcycle, behind a red-haired Hyomin.) Her apparent entrance drew fierce controversy at the time, given her age—14!—and the ham-handed way in which T-ara’s CEO, Kim Kwang Soo, announced the addition, claiming that he saw her on the sidewalk and immediately turned his car around to cast her. Um... okay. (Dani would end up postponing her debut, and eventually never joined T-ara.)
Baggage aside, Day By Day is one of T-ara’s better tracks, which is high praise considering the general quality of their discography. It’s a shame that it got buried in the quote-on-quote “bullying” scandal which happened immediately prior to this song’s release, and which has infected their careers since.