Damn Idol, Chapter 106
Amid this atmosphere, the digital chart competition between the top-tier boy groups that had collided was interesting as well.
Looking only at the results, NOP beat Drop Out and took first place.
But their firepower wasn’t overwhelming.
The gap in metrics was small enough that, with one slip, Selfish could climb back up to first place.
At this, Drop Out’s fandom mocked NOP’s fandom, saying they were barely competing with a song that had been released ten days earlier.
Conversely, NOP’s fandom fired back that even if they had been released at the same time, the result would have been the same.
It was a time when a tense competitive atmosphere and war of nerves continued beneath the surface.
Around then, an issue quietly popped up.
- Isn’t Resume fucking good?
- Yeah, yeah, why isn’t it released on streaming?
- The video where someone extracted the audio and put it over the Coming Up Next footage had 300k views when I saw it yesterday.
- That video got taken down.
- Huh? Why??
- Seems like M Show contacted them for using their footage without permission.
- Wow, fuck, M Show has zero sense.
- For real, no wonder people call it a damn show.
- Sedalbaegil’s self-produced content hit 1.8 million views.
- Wow, what kind of self-content gets views like that lol
- I really think Han Sion is a genius. He seems a little insane, but when it comes to selling people on their skills, he’s definitely got it.
- Yeah, yeah, skill snobs around me all got hooked because of Resume.
- I’m one of them. Honestly, during Coming Up Next, I didn’t believe it was 100% self-composed lolol
People had begun taking interest in Resume, the song Sedalbaegil had revealed in the first episode of their self-produced content.
Of course, it wasn’t receiving fervent support on the level of
It had not been registered as a digital track, and it did not have Coming Up Next’s halo effect either.
Without a backstory, it was not easy for it to become killer content.
Even so, the fact that interest in it did not die down meant that its musical power was strong.
Radio Head, a band regarded as having defined the Britpop era.
Their representative song, Creep.
Creep was a song no one didn’t know, but not many people knew how that song succeeded.
At the time of its release, Creep received heavy criticism for its excessively gloomy lyrics and atmosphere.
The magazine NME wrote a negative article, and BBC Radio 1 blacklisted it on the grounds that it had a bad influence on the public.
Unlike Korea’s music industry, which revolves around music broadcasts, the Western music industry runs primarily on radio airplay.
So being placed on a radio station’s blacklist was, in effect, the same as saying the song’s lifespan was over.
But as stated earlier, good music has power.
It began with Yoav Kutner, a fairly influential DJ in Israel, falling head over heels for Creep.
He began playing the song endlessly on his radio show, and listeners protested.
They asked what on earth this tiresome, gloomy song was.
But the situation reversed in an instant.
Because it was a good song.
Once Creep became popular in Israel, it was reverse-exported to America, and from America, reverse-exported back to Britain.
This was a case where the pure power of music ended up creating its own story.
Of course, the 1990s could not be compared to the present.
Now was an era where hundreds of songs poured out every day, and stimulating content flooded everywhere from YouTube to OTT platforms.
Even so, Han Sion thought an opportunity would come for Resume as well.
And he was preparing for it.
With the mindset that he himself would become Sedalbaegil’s Yoav Kutner.
But things in the world did not always go as intended.
Reality was where unimaginable things happened without any foreshadowing.
This time was the same.
Something unimaginable happened regarding Resume.
In a very…
Good way.
* * *
The size of Korea’s education market was around 50 trillion won, and the private education expenses for elementary, middle, and high school students made up a 10-trillion-won market.
In other words, 40 trillion was an education market not for “advancement to higher schools,” but for “success.”
Success in Korean society was mostly related to circumstances before and after employment.
In this job market, there was an unrivaled figure: instructor Yang Seokhun.
At first, Yang Seokhun was someone who gave job interview lectures and corrected self-introduction letters on YouTube.
But because his skills were so good, he gradually expanded his range of activities, and now ran a consulting company related to employment.
In addition, he consistently uploaded videos to YouTube and had amassed an enormous number of subscribers.
However, Yang Seokhun did not become famous solely because of his ability.
It was because people could feel that he sincerely supported job seekers and truly wanted to help them get hired.
That was why Yang Seokhun’s channel did not only upload stiff, employment-related videos.
Guerrilla street counseling booths.
Bittersweet documentaries about daily life after getting hired, and so on.
Videos containing humor were uploaded as well.
They were not uploaded often, but whenever they were, they became a big topic.
There was a reason people called him “Job-Seeker God” and “the Father of Late Twenties and Early Thirties.”
Then, on his YouTube channel, a video with a completely out-of-nowhere title was uploaded.
The title of the video was…
People in their mid-to-late twenties and early-to-mid thirties preparing for employment were at the stage of life farthest removed from cultural content.
That was why the majority of Yang Seokhun’s 4.7 million subscribers did not know what Sedalbaegil was.
They did not even know what Coming Up Next was.
Though they may have heard the song itself on the street.
So everyone clicked the video with question marks floating above their heads.
The video began with Yang Seokhun, wearing a dress shirt buttoned up to his neck, a neat tie, and a two-button suit, bowing politely.
Because Yang Seokhun usually uploaded videos in comfortable clothes, it felt like extremely official and formal content.
After bowing politely, Yang Seokhun adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and opened his mouth.
[Writing a self-introduction letter is very difficult, isn’t it?]
[You don’t know what competencies the company is asking of you, and you don’t know what competencies you have either.]
[When you write it this way, it feels like this isn’t right, and when you write it that way, what you wrote before seems better…]
[It’s truly difficult.]
It was a story any job seeker could relate to.
[So today, to help all of you write your self-introduction letters, I’ve prepared correction content.]
[Then, let’s begin.]
As Yang Seokhun bowed politely once again, an unfamiliar video appeared on the screen showing the lecture materials.
The job seekers didn’t know it, but it was a clip taken from Sedalbaegil’s self-produced content.
- A résumé.
- A résumé?
- We have to find work in the music industry too. It’s a kind of job seeking, right?
The video stopped with a click.
[As you can see, these young men want to seek employment.]
[Then what do they need?]
The screen changed, and a paused shot from Resume’s live performance video appeared.
Resume (Live Version).
[Resume. A résumé. They need the thing that makes all of you rack your brains.]
[This is the résumé written by an applicant called Sedalbaegil. They even have the nerve to openly state that they wrote it live and tossed it out there.]
[Let’s take a look at how they wrote it.]
By this point, Yang Seokhun’s subscribers realized that this video was completely a comedy video.
Well, the cooldown had come around.
Yang Seokhun tried to upload at least one funny video a month, and around this time last month, he had delivered big laughs with a human documentary called “The Life of the Unemployed.”
Because his acting was atrocious.
Just as the subscribers comfortably adjusted their posture in their seats, the beat began to flow.
Then the song began with the part of Gu Taehwan, master of intros.
Woo
- Hello
All night, did you
have good dreams?
A warm feeling
The video stopped.
[There are probably people who flinched just now.]
[Quite a lot of people begin their self-introduction letters like this. I have a positive and bright personality, blah blah.]
[Some even put in the outdated cliché before that, saying they were born as the nth child in a family of so many sons and daughters…]
[But everyone!]
[Companies are not interested in your emotional state. What companies are curious about is your ability to calmly resolve work even if your emotional state is shit.]
[Delete all of it.]
Shaking his head, Yang Seokhun played the video again.
This time, it was I Ion.
Woo
- Hello
A little quickly,
I start the day,
A fresh morning
[An appeal of diligence? Good. But to appeal to that, you need sufficient evidence.]
[You just write that you’re someone who wakes up earlier than others and gets moving? Do you think the hiring manager will believe that?]
[If you can’t write about an accomplishment achieved through diligence and a related experience, it’s better not to write it at all.]
[Delete all of it.]
The next to appear was Choi Jaeseong, looking at a paper newspaper.
I’m curious
- About everything
What I
- Can do
[I have abundant intellectual curiosity, so I enjoy reading, and I read the newspaper every morning. That’s a sentence people really write often in self-introduction letters, right?]
[But you can’t write it vaguely like this! You need specific examples!]
[I recently saw a certain article in the newspaper, and it made me think a certain way. That connects to this issue at your company.]
[You need to reinforce the details.]
The things I must do,
I don’t turn away from them—
When On Saemiro’s part came out, Yang Seokhun loosened his tie with a truly huge sigh.
[How many times have I said this? If you’re going to appeal to your sense of responsibility, write about a specific experience where you solved something with responsibility.]
[If you just say, “I have a sense of responsibility,” who’s going to believe you?]
Now it was the last part, Han Sion’s chorus.
We are
- Here,
desperate,
wanting it—
At that moment, Yang Seokhun, acting frenzied, slammed the desk.
[The worst! The worst!]
[Please stop writing things like “I’m desperate” or “I earnestly want this” in your self-introduction letters.]
[Appeal to things like that with your attitude in the interview, while looking them in the eye!]
[And if you write things like this, you’ll get pressure questions in the interview, I’m telling you. “What will you do if you’re also accepted by a competing company?”]
After that, the members’ group chorus came out.
We are
- Here,
desperate,
wanting it—
[Nothing changes just because you plead as a group.]
[Even if you write about a team project experience, you must emphasize your individual competencies. Understood?]
With a sigh, Yang Seokhun turned off the video, then startled and fixed his tie.
[Ah, I apologize. I got a little worked up.]
[In any case, the correction is finished, so let’s look at the before and after.]
Yang Seokhun’s face disappeared, and Sedalbaegil’s video switched to the full version.
With the word Before stamped in large letters in the upper left corner, the live performance of the first verse of Resume continued.
When the video ended, this time the word After was stamped on the screen, and the beat flowed from the beginning again.
But only the beat flowed.
Woo
- Hello
All night, did you
have good dreams?
A warm feeling (Deleted)
Woo
- Hello
A little quickly,
I start the day,
A fresh morning (Deleted)
And so, amid the softly ringing beat, the video ended.
Along with the final caption.
- LOOOOOOOOOOOL ah, insane, Teacher Seokhun lolololololol
- Ah, this is so damn funny lololololol but it overlaps with my self-intro a bit, so I flinched.
- Lololololol why is the song unnecessarily so good lololol
- Lololol that’s too harsh. The kids wrote the lyrics using their strengths lololol
- Does anyone know where this is from? It seems like an idol group.
- It’s on Sedalbaegil’s official channel! It’s self-produced content!
The comments were in an uproar.