kawa
Two girls wrote a breakup song, filmed the evidence themselves, and left us alone with the crying emoticon.
Lyrics: Doeun and Jiana
Composition: KIGGEN, Doeun and Jiana
Arrangement: KIGGEN
Video: Directed, edited and VFX by Doeun; filmed by Doeun and Jiana
What changed every time I replayed it
First time: I thought the video looked homemade. Then I read the credits and realized that was not an insult. Doeun directed and edited it. She and Jiana filmed it. Okay then. Now the weird angles are theirs, and that changes how I look at every shot.
Second time: The hook got me. “Thinkin’ about ㅠ” is such a little gremlin of a line. It sounds like “thinking about you,” but ㅠ is also the crying face in Korean texting. So she is thinking about him, thinking about crying, and probably doing both while staring at her phone. I hate how efficient that is.
Third time: I paid attention to who sounded hurt and who sounded irritated. Doeun seems annoyed that she is still stuck on him. Jiana lets the missing-him part show more. Neither one wins the breakup. That feels correct.
Fourth time: I wanted the instrumental to change more near the end. The loop fits an obsessive thought, yes. I still needed something to happen after the song had made that point. Drop the drums. Add a new harmony. Let one of them sound properly fed up. Anything.
Fifth time: I was still listening, so apparently the loop knew what it was doing.
The song sounds like 1 a.m. and poor judgment
The beat stays soft and close. It has enough low-end movement to keep the song from lying flat, but it never turns the breakup into a nightclub emergency. Thank goodness. Not every bad boyfriend needs a dance break.
KIGGEN leaves space around the voices. That helps because Doeun and Jiana are not trying to win a singing contest here. They are talking through the same mess from slightly different corners. Doeun’s delivery is drier. She sounds like she has explained this man to herself several times and remains mad that the explanation did not fix anything. Jiana sounds more willing to admit she misses him.
The drums clip along without making a big announcement. The hazier sounds around them give the track that half-awake feeling where memories become more convincing than facts. You know the relationship was bad. Your brain has selected three nice moments and scheduled a reunion tour.
I do think the arrangement plays too safely after the hook establishes itself. Repetition makes sense. No movement at all does not. The last third needs a bruise, a crack, a chair getting dragged across the emotional floor. Right now the song ends before either woman does something she will regret enough for a second verse.
They know he is bad news. They still want him to call.
This is the part I appreciate. The lyrics do not jump from heartbreak to “I love myself now” because the chorus arrived. Doeun and Jiana stay in the embarrassing middle.
He left. He may be seeing somebody else. He was cold. He is rude. The evidence is not in his favor. None of that stops the checking, dreaming, remembering or wondering if he might answer. People do this every day and then act surprised when the phone ruins dinner.
Doeun tries to keep a little distance from the whole thing. Jiana does not sound interested in pretending she has moved on. Put those voices together and the song becomes a conversation friends have after one of them says, “I am done,” while opening his profile again.
The bilingual hook is also how young people actually write online. Languages mix. Symbols finish sentences. A crying face can carry more tone than a paragraph. Cleaning that into formal English would make the lyric easier to grade and much less interesting.
The video looks like they passed the camera back and forth
That is a compliment. The person behind the camera does not feel invisible. Sometimes the framing looks like one girl is watching the other. Sometimes it feels like they are collecting proof that this horrible little era happened.
A larger company video might smooth the locations, light every face perfectly and make the sadness beautiful enough to sell lip gloss. This one leaves some awkwardness in. Breakups are awkward. You spend twenty minutes looking for meaning in a screenshot and then realize the screenshot is from the wrong week.
Doeun’s editing gives the memories a slightly damaged quality. Images repeat, jump or feel too close. I do not think every rough cut is secretly profound. Some cuts are simply rough. The overall approach still matches the song because the women are stuck reviewing fragments, not telling a clean story from beginning to end.
The video also changes the power relationship. They are not only the sad girls being looked at. They choose how the sadness gets recorded. That does not make them magically healed or fully in control. It does mean the heartbreak belongs to their point of view.
The details I kept
- ㅠ: It sounds like “you” inside the English phrase and looks like tears in Korean text language. Simple. Smart. Mildly evil.
- The lowercase title: “kawa” looks like a file name somebody never intended to explain to adults.
- The camera passing: Both women get to be the person seen and the person deciding what gets seen.
- The repeated hook: It behaves like reopening the same chat. The answer has not changed. Apparently we are checking again.
- The small rooms and reachable locations: Nothing looks safely far away. The memories could have happened last week.
I am not calling every camera shake a confirmed symbol. The credits are facts. My reading of the shaky memories is my reading. Both can sit on the page without pretending Doeun sent me a forty-page director statement.
Why this little mixtape song matters
YOUNG POSSE already has a strong group personality. They are funny, strange, hip-hop-minded and willing to look a little ridiculous. “kawa” shows something the louder group concepts cannot: Doeun and Jiana have taste behind the performance.
They helped write and compose the song. They made the video. Doeun handled directing, editing and effects. That does not mean they worked alone in a vacuum. KIGGEN arranged it, and the release still exists inside a company system. It does mean “member participation” is more than a decorative credit near the bottom.
This is also where I get suspicious of companies praising DIY work too loudly. Creative freedom is good. Making young artists do six jobs because the budget disappeared is not freedom. Credit them, pay them, give them equipment and let them sleep. Authenticity should not become a coupon code for free labor.
From a Confucian angle, the collaboration works because neither woman has to disappear for the other to look talented. They have different roles and tones, but the song needs the exchange. Group harmony is supposed to make each part useful, not grind everybody into one agreeable paste.
The feminist part is even more direct. Young women sing about heartbreak constantly, but they do not always get to decide how that heartbreak looks. Here, Doeun and Jiana can be needy, suspicious, annoyed, inconsistent and a little foolish. Nobody rushes in with a tidy empowerment slogan to make them respectable before the final chorus.
And yes, I called it a side quest. Side quests are sometimes where the actual character writing lives. The main campaign tells me what the company wants to sell this month. A weird smaller project can tell me what the members are curious enough to make.
What I liked and what still bothers me
I liked
- The ㅠ hook, obviously
- Doeun and Jiana sounding like two people, not one blended sadness setting
- The camera feeling handled instead of invisible
- Member work across both the song and video
- A breakup that stays messy past the first chorus
I still side-eye
- The arrangement needs one real change near the end
- Some English lines stumble
- A few rough edits do not automatically become art because the members made them
- I want Jiana to get more room for the melodic ache
- I want proof that all this DIY labor came with actual support
Final take
I would not clean “kawa” until it shines like a title track. That would defeat the reason I care about it. I would give it more time, a stronger final section and better support around the work the members are already doing.
The song catches the specific stupidity of missing somebody you have already judged correctly. The video looks like the girls kept the camera near because they did not trust anybody else to remember it right. The hook sits there with two little tears and waits for you to notice.
