music videos

one little treat i get every now and then is being able to watch mongolian music videos on the bus. several buses here in UB have little tvs affixed to the wall behind the 'driver cubby.' a few of them are functioning and generally have some kind of entertaining program running. sometimes it's european candid camera type stuff, or it's a long stream of weird ads, or it's mongolian music videos.

my favorites are music videos. this morning, the first one i caught was really quite happy. in it, a young mongolian man with bleached blonde hair was walking around a neighborhood singing very passionately while all the mongolians around him were smiling and high-fiving each other or kissing or hugging or holding hands. sometimes there would be quick shots of half naked little boys joyfully jumping into the river for a swim, or dudes hugging before one gets on a train, or a family happily walking together down the street, or an airline worker smooching a pair of plane tickets she got as a gift from her co-workers, or some lady running into the arms of her boyfriend, or a sweaty Olympic medalist and his coach cheering victoriously with the mongolian flag draped on their shoulders. then our blonde mongolian friend would reappear on screen in a new neighborhood, weaving in and out of his band mates as more mongolians behind him continued high-fiving, kissing, hugging, holding hands. occasionaly a young mongolian girl would pop up on screen lip-syncing to the singer's words.

most of the time i'm too distracted by the visual to really care about the audio so generally i have no idea what the singers are singing about. watching the music videos is sometimes like putting a puzzle together but finding out along the way that some of the pieces don't quite fit. often in the music videos there are strange surprises that don't seem to comply with the story being told. but you know to the insiders, all the images are connected by the often sporadic asthetic unique to mongolians.

in the next one, an older mongolian singer dressed very casually and wearing a khaki baseball cap was standing in the middle of CG football field. he was singing about a love story between two people who grew up together. the guy loves the girl when they're young, but the girl doesn't love him. so he ends up with a different girl (who is just awful) thinking that his childhood friend still doesn't love him - but by the time they're adults her feelings have changed. by the end of the video, the guy is in the middle of his wedding to the awful girl and when it's time to put the ring on her finger he snatches it and runs away leaving her at the altar. he's running back to his childhood girl, but i had to get off the bus before the video fully ended.