| Episode 10. Monthly Evaluation (1)
My days were busy enough with practice alone, but there was still plenty I had to take care of.
The most representative example was the monthly evaluation. As it happened, I was also given a new task related to the evaluation.
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[SYSTEM] A “new task” has been assigned.
▷ Establish a plan for the monthly evaluation
▷ Reward: EXP (10)
[SYSTEM] A “new task” has been assigned.
▷ Earn a passing score in the monthly evaluation
▷ Reward: EXP (30)
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It seemed earning a passing score really was important. Even after the EXP adjustment, it was giving a whopping 30 EXP.
More importantly, if I don’t get a passing score, I fail to meet the KPI right away. Shouldn’t you be making me plan properly?
UA’s evaluation criteria consisted of two elements: vocals and dance. And lately, I had been focusing more on dance practice.
There were two main reasons for that.
First, while I could at least pretend to sing, I had never danced even once in my life.
If you had two assignments, one in Korean composition and one in German composition, the first thing to do was buy a German vocabulary book.
I was at least more confident about memorizing lyrics than memorizing choreography.
So I invested most of the early part of my allotted practice time into dance. Since I had safely memorized the choreography, I had passed the first hurdle.
Second, because the number of vocal lessons I would receive before the monthly evaluation was scheduled to be lower than the number of dance lessons.
That meant there would be less feedback from vocal lessons for me to hear and apply compared to dance lessons.
And in reality, even when I had one lesson each, there had been less feedback in the vocal lesson.
‘It’s better to properly master what I’ve been taught first than to half-assedly show off on my own.’
If you teach a rookie ten things, but he goes off, watches some nonsense somewhere, and ruins all ten, he’s worse than a rookie who’s taught one thing and performs that one thing perfectly.
Besides, the problems that had come up in vocal lessons were, thankfully, still within the range I could digest on my own.
So while I diversified my investments, I put a few more eggs in the dance basket.
My final goal was to drag my weak points up by the collar and show that I could at least pull half my weight.
Once I had set a direction, I could focus on dance practice, so it was efficient.
The end of all these plans was ultimately pointing in one direction.
Position.
There was only one thing I was aiming for: sub-vocal.
Spark’s vocals were quite solid. After all, UA, a famous house of vocals, had planned them ambitiously.
The group’s position balance was good, too.
In the vocal line, Park Juu and Jeong Seongbin held the center, while in the dance line, Choi Jeho and Gang Giyeon did the same.
If Lee Cheonghyeon, who was in charge of rap, had also performed rap perfectly and shown only cool sides of himself, everyone would have been at peace, but…….
Reality had a lot more twists and turns. Because the vocal difficulty of the songs UA had handed over to Spark in their early days was truly atrocious.
Perhaps because UA wanted to be reborn through Spark as a small but powerful idol powerhouse, they dumped a whole pile of songs on Spark that made you wonder, “How are they supposed to sing this while dancing?”
≫ UA, those sons of b*tches, do they have a grudge against the kids’ vocal cords?
└ If it were me, the moment I got triple high notes for four songs in a row and they called them “parts,” I would’ve already sued UA
Spark, blessed with shining talent, astonishingly handled dolphin high notes and power dancing every single time.
In that process, Lee Cheonghyeon had to pull quadruple duty with lyric writing, composition, rap, and vocals. Jeong Seongbin developed vocal nodules.
Since I knew injuries could occur, the issue of my position had already reached a potential conclusion inside me.
‘If I take even a little bit of the singing burden off them, the members won’t have to play four roles each.’
So I decided to prepare for the sub-vocal position, someone who could create breathing room for the members.
To begin with, that was about the only part I could help with.
Once I set my goal as “a member who fills in only the vocals while standing out as little as possible,” the assignment became clear.
I felt like I could get as far as being a member who filled in only the vocals if I shed a little blood, sweat, and tears.
Because among the many songs Spark would sing in the future, there were definitely parts I could handle with my vocal range.
It was an incredible relief that the evaluation categories were exactly these two. If there had been fan service, I would have had to bite my tongue and be reborn.
No, but seriously, why don’t they test fan service? Isn’t that the most basic quality of an idol?
I don’t know what effect Spark’s fan service had, but I did know this much: the fans had desperately wanted Spark’s fan service.
It wasn’t as if those guys were wooden statues with iron plates over their faces, so they did seem to be trying to do something in their own way, but objectively speaking, they were crude attempts unworthy of their faces.
This is why Spark’s fan service failed, the fandom atmosphere sank, trolls swarmed in, articles came out every day, and the kids disbanded…….
Thinking about it made my blood boil again. Deep breaths, deep breaths.
Anyway. Now the remaining task was that I had to stand out as little as possible in the team.
If one stiff frozen pollack was creaking around among sparkling idols, there was no way he wouldn’t stand out, so I had to practice dance like my life depended on it, too.
Once I reached that potential conclusion, the task telling me to establish an evaluation plan was marked complete.
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[SYSTEM] “Task” has been completed.
▷ Reward: EXP (10) awarded
▷ Accumulated EXP: 10
▷ Accumulated Points: 0
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Now, if I gathered just 90 more EXP, I could match my dance proficiency and vocal proficiency.
The first milestone was right in front of me.
* * *
After becoming independent when I turned twenty, I had lived alone for about seven years, excluding the time I spent in the military.
Because of that, there was one basic manner I had briefly forgotten.
When you had roommates, you had to match their sleep patterns.
Thanks to that, I had to pretend to sleep, something not even in my fate, and wait for those guys to fall asleep.
And around the time Choi Jeho and Lee Cheonghyeon stopped tossing and turning, I carefully came out of the room.
The living room past one in the morning was dark and quiet.
If I turned on the lights, the whole house would brighten up, so I had no choice but to turn on only the laptop.
Thankfully, the agency had placed one in the dorm for searching videos.
I wanted to use WebCell, but unfortunately, the NS program wasn’t installed on the laptop.
I was dying to submit an approval request to purchase the license.
‘If I end up needing to use it just one more time, I’m buying it with my own money.’
Having no choice, I opened a spreadsheet and filled in the categories one by one.
They were song title, lyric memorization level, fundamentals, and total score, in that order.
Next, under song title, I wrote down all the songs I knew and crossed out every song for which I hadn’t memorized at least 70% of the lyrics.
Since the time I could use was limited, I intended to pour my resources into improving proficiency rather than memorizing lyrics.
Lastly, based on the fundamentals I had learned in vocal lessons, I scored each item according to how suitable I thought it was for showing them.
‘I should think of methods other than simple manual-labor brainstorming.’
I was typing away with dry eyes, feeling a familiar sense of stability, when someone’s hand appeared out of the darkness and tapped beside the laptop.
When I raised my head, Jeong Seongbin was standing on the opposite side of the dining table, his eyes half open.
You startled me. You’re pretty good at not making your presence known, huh?
“Why?”
When I asked in a quiet voice, Jeong Seongbin blinked and said,
“I’m sorry for interrupting. But hyung, what are you doing……?”
“I’m choosing the song I’ll sing for the evaluation. Do you need to use the living room?”
“No, that’s not it…… It’s late, but I saw someone in the living room.”
Drowsiness clung thickly to Jeong Seongbin’s voice and face.
When I looked at the clock, it was already three in the morning.
I had no idea when that much time had passed.
This rotten world, honestly. Prices and time both run ahead without me.
“I’ll wrap this up soon and go in. If you woke up from sleeping, hurry back inside. Today’s good sleep makes tomorrow’s 180 centimeters.”
Jeong Seongbin, who had only gotten nagged in the middle of the night, didn’t immediately go back. Instead, he looked back and forth between me and the clock. Then he pulled out the chair across from me and sat down at the dining table.
“Do you have any candidates in mind?”
“Huh?”
“Song candidates.”
Jeong Seongbin asked while rubbing his eyes.
Amazingly, it seemed Jeong Seongbin was willing to stop sleeping and stay in the living room for my sake.
I felt more at ease when I was alone, though.
But no matter how much resentment I had tied up with Spark, ignoring someone right in front of me would be rude.
I showed Jeong Seongbin the list of about seventy songs that had survived the fierce survival round.
“The scores are……. Ah, you scored them based on what the teacher said, right?”
“Yeah. And mainly songs that felt similar in vocal range to the ones I sang during class.”
Jeong Seongbin nodded from time to time at my explanation as he read the list. Then he murmured in a voice that clearly hadn’t fully woken up yet.
“I think I have a rough idea of what kind of songs you want to choose. Considering the vocal range I heard during the vocal lesson, I think you could sing this song…… too. Have you heard it before?”
“Are you trying to help me right now?”
“I don’t know if I’ll be much help. If you wanted to choose from songs you already know because you were worried about getting the lyrics wrong…… how about this one?”
“…….”
“The lyrics for the first and second verses of this song are almost the same. The lyrics are short, too.”
I did know he was affectionate by nature, judging by the phrase “Kind Seongbin” that appeared without fail in their self-produced content.
But I had thought that was only relatively speaking, compared to the other members.
Looking at the dozing Jeong Seongbin, I wondered for a moment if the right thing to do was simply carry him back to his room.
Still, I carefully wrote down his spell-like feedback.
After that, too, K-pop star instructor Jeong Seongbin fiddled with his lips as he marked my candidates with circles and triangles or repeatedly removed and added songs, narrowing them down to a total of thirty. My batting average seemed to be about .410.
Even considering there were guidelines, the speed at which Jeong Seongbin output appropriate values in a situation where conditions had suddenly been set was not ordinary.
‘Seongbin-hyung is the real K-pop monster! He’s practically a karaoke veteran.’
‘He even knows songs that came out before he was born.’
‘Hyung, do you just listen to songs after meals? Ah…… you only listen to songs.’
‘Then Seongbin-ssi’s nickname will be Karaoke Veteran!’
Seeing it directly before my eyes, I felt like I understood how terrifying a veteran could be.
To survive in the harsh world of idols, it seemed you had to become this much of an intellectual.
“I think it might be good to choose from among these. What do you think, hyung? Since it’s an evaluation, would a more recent song be better after all……?”
There was no way to interpret Jeong Seongbin helping me as anything other than goodwill.
Even if he tried to shake me down in exchange for helping, the only thing Jeong Seongbin could take from me would be my organs.
Jeong Seongbin’s character was the kind of character that was hard to find in someone who slept four to five hours, ate only a low-calorie diet all day, and danced and sang.
At least, it would have been impossible for me. Even more so if I had been eighteen, Jeong Seongbin’s current age.
So this is the level you have to be at to be a leader. I was inwardly admiring him when my eyes met Jeong Seongbin’s.
Perhaps he had woken up in the meantime, because Jeong Seongbin’s eyes were bright and sparkling.
I had seen a photo where countless cheering light sticks were reflected in those eyes. It had been when they made a birthday advertisement to hang at Exit 4 of Gangnam Station.
“Hyung?”
“Uh, yeah. I’ll decide on the details after listening to the ones you recommended, too. Thanks.”
“It’s nothing. Hang in there.”
Though right now, only the pitch-black kitchen and the dim laptop light were reflected in them.
I felt the urge to ask Jeong Seongbin, “Why are you this kind even to a random stiff klutz passing by?”
But I held back because I worried that if I didn’t put Jeong Seongbin to sleep now, he might end up growing less in the future.
An idol’s growth period is precious. I have to protect it.