Damn Idol, Episode 152
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The fans of Sedalbaegil watching today’s M Show music broadcast couldn’t calm their pounding hearts.
It wasn’t because they were looking forward to Sedalbaegil’s stage.
That was a given.
What they were truly anticipating was their first music show win.
The general public tended to take chart No. 1s and music show No. 1s lightly.
They assumed that when a somewhat popular singer released a new song, the broadcasting stations just handed out wins among them as they saw fit.
But reality was nothing like that.
It differed from month to month, of course, but nearly eight idol groups debuted every month.
More than half of them disappeared without even getting their names known to the public.
Some vanished after a single music show performance, and some didn’t even get that much.
Only one or two teams a month entered the public eye and earned the title of “rookie idol.”
The rest became nameless groups that couldn’t even be called rookie idols.
Among those rookie idols, how many teams could actually make it to No. 1 on a music show?
If twenty-four teams a year could be considered rookie idols capable of “consistent activity,” only three or four of them could even aim for first place.
So if Sedalbaegil won No. 1 on a music show, they would truly be making history.
Had any singer ever won first place on their debut stage?
There had been some, but not many.
And all of them had belonged to major entertainment companies that burned through enormous promotional budgets.
Then had an independent act with no agency ever taken first place on a music show?
There probably had been cases, but they were all artists who had risen to stardom first and then gone independent.
There had never been anyone who reached No. 1 as an independent from the moment of debut.
That was why Sedalbaegil’s fans were so nervous with anticipation.
Because today, the first such record in K-pop history might be made.
‘Considering M Show’s stance these days…….’ ‘It feels possible, doesn’t it?’
From what the fans had guessed, Sedalbaegil had a fairly good chance of winning first place.
Their broadcast score was quite lacking, but M Show was a station that weighed preference scores more heavily than broadcast scores.
Preference scores often infuriated fans.
Because the station never revealed the exact method of calculation and seemed to use it however they liked.
But according to information passed around in whispers, the preference score was a format that awarded points for “the general public’s preference.”
In other words, Sedalbaegil had an enormous advantage.
Idol music had become a massive current leading K-pop, but it was still trapped within prejudice.
There were still many people who assumed idol music would be bad without even listening to it.
That trend would disappear after the pandemic era, but for now, it was still 2017.
However, the group that had stepped outside such prejudice was Sedalbaegil.
Sedalbaegil is different somehow!
That was the public reaction.
It was while the fans were encouraging text voting on social media and cautiously sending messages to their friends.
[Let’s meet Sedalbaegil, who have been nominated for first place on their debut stage!]
Sedalbaegil appeared for the mid-show interview.
The interview was ordinary.
Today, Sedalbaegil had a “hot debut” stage, and they had been assigned a whopping three stages.
K-Pop Struggle, State of Mind, and Pin Point.
Since the terrestrial music shows only gave them two stages, K-Pop Struggle’s stage on M Mixdown had been the last.
In other words, M Show had taken a stance of pushing Sedalbaegil.
Because no matter how popular someone was, it was extremely rare to give them three stages.
As the questions continued, the MC glanced at the cue sheet, grinned, and threw out a question.
The fans wouldn’t know, but this one question was the only one that hadn’t been agreed on in advance.
[You’ve been nominated for first place today! Please make one promise for if you achieve No. 1!]
Since they received a sign that there wasn’t much time left, the members naturally looked at Han Sion.
He was the leader by position, and most of the decision-making had been handled by Han Sion.
On top of that, promises like these were usually light events, such as switching parts while singing.
Sure enough, Han Sion answered lightly, without much hesitation.
[If we’re given an encore stage, we’ll do it without accompaniment.]
[Without accompaniment?]
[Yes.]
But his answer was not light at all.
While the MC, who was also an active idol, stood there flustered, the interview time ended.
[T-that was Sedalbaegil! Then, the next stage is…….]
The MC barely managed to continue hosting out of professionalism, but the internet’s reaction was heated.
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ They’re saying they’ll remove their own MR?
-They must be pretty damn confident??
-Isn’t Han Sion just trying to make himself stand out?
-What are you talking about? Go watch Masked Singer and Seuneomje.
-No, but is Choi Jaeseong really filming Seuneomje? Didn’t he leave the show?
-ㄴㄴ They said he’s still filming. One of the contestants who got eliminated last time posted a review.
-But they probably won’t let him into the Top 10, right? Once it gets that far, all the agencies get involved.
-ㅇㅇㅇㅇ Obviously.
-What if Sedalbaegil doesn’t get first place? I want to see them sing without accompaniment.
-Go vote ㄱㄱ
-How do you do it?
-Open your eyes. It keeps showing up in the captions.
The general public found it interesting as well.
-Kyaa. This is what you call selling them on skill, right?
-I love it so much hahaha
-It’s already spreading to general communitiesㅋㅋㅋ There are articles out too!
-So damn fastㅋㅋ
TT liked it too.
Time passed like that, and at last, Sedalbaegil’s stage time arrived.
The first stage was the already revealed mixed stage of K-Pop Struggle and State of Mind.
K-Pop Struggle began first, and around the two-thirds point of the song, it changed into State of Mind.
But it wasn’t an obvious mix.
If anything, it felt closer to a mashup (a method of mixing several songs to create a new song)
than anything else.
Or, one could say they had transferred the feeling of the music video onto the stage.
Devices that were only possible because it was pre-recorded burst out one after another, and Sedalbaegil, who had been singing K-Pop Struggle, were dragged away somewhere and began singing State of Mind.
-Kyaa, they’re so good.
-This is weird. No matter how much I watch, the fan filter won’t come off.
-If it’s to that extent, then it’s not a fan filter.
There was something that everyone, including TT, who had listened to Sedalbaegil’s first full-length album, commonly said.
That the feeling the music gave when heard by ear and when seen with the eyes was completely different.
Such words could sometimes be used in a negative sense.
But for Sedalbaegil, they were used in a very positive sense.
When listening to the album, the music was static.
No matter how many times one listened to it on repeat, it wasn’t tiring at all, and it was filled with the stability and satisfaction that good music gave.
But once performance was added, the songs seemed to turn dynamic and dramatic.
People were concluding that the reason for this was because Sedalbaegil had perfectly analyzed the music and created their performances.
That wasn’t wrong.
Only, if there was one more device, it was that Han Sion had placed considerable differences between the album tracks and the live tracks.
He hadn’t touched the music, but he had touched the devices a little.
As a simple example, the overall compressor level differed between the tracks included in the album and the live tracks.
The drums, in particular, had quite a lot of difference.
Because of that, even though people had heard the songs with their ears, they wanted to see the performances.
This wasn’t only the story of TT.
Even the general public, who liked music but had only casually consumed idol music, had gathered in front of the music broadcast.
-It’s Pin Point now, right?
-ㅇㅇㅇ I’m curious about the stage.
-But isn’t this song good?
-ㅇㅇㅇㅇ I don’t get why this can’t go to No. 1 on the charts.
-Summer Cream seems to be the real public pick. Sedalbaegil’s fandom loves Summer Cream too.
-But listening to Summer Cream puts you in a good mood. They said it’s moombahton? Something like thatㅋㅋ
-Hey, damn it. It’s moombahton that Hip Sion co-composed with Roots Robby hyung. The level is differentㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Who’s Roots Robby?
-Just think of it like this. Who recorded the most something-or-other on the Billboard reggae chart? Roots Robby. Who won the most something-or-other for reggae at the Grammy Awards? That’s also Roots Robby.
-If Bob Marley is reggae’s grandfather, Roots Robby is its father.
-Their ages aren’t that far apart.
-Bob hyung is dead, thoughㅠㅠㅠㅠ
-Hip Sion, that punk. He should’ve pushed Summer Cream as the title track. Bet he’s crying because he placed it as track 10.
-You’re a Han Sion newbie, aren’t you? Hip Sion is laughing.
-This is correct.
-Pin Point is startingㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Oh, what are those outfits?
-ㄷㄷ So damn cool.
Sedalbaegil’s fandom firmly believed that the stage for Pin Point would be a military look.
The music had a majestic yet tense feeling.
It was a song that naturally brought to mind a scene from a war movie, with a sound that made one’s heart race as they listened.
But Sedalbaegil’s outfits were not those of soldiers.
-It’s Hong Kong noir ㄷㄷ
-No matchsticks in their mouths?
-Old man....
They had reinterpreted the trench coats and sunglasses unique to Hong Kong noir with a modern feel.
If done wrong, it could have looked old-fashioned, but instead, it looked hip.
In particular, Lee Ion, with platinum-blond hair and orange-lensed sunglasses, was dazzling.
The stage that began like that had choreography far tighter than the stages Sedalbaegil usually showed.
In Korea, techno was treated like an outdated genre, but strictly speaking, techno was a term that broadly referred to electronic music.
These days, however, in a narrower sense, it was generally used to refer to a genre that began with Detroit house and was developed by highly educated people.
At present, EDM had swallowed the electronic music market, but that didn’t mean techno’s lineage had been cut off.
And the one who represented that was Mary Jones.
People said this and that about the essence of techno, but Han Sion’s thoughts were a little different.
The strength of techno that Han Sion thought of was “empty space.”
So he had added a classical melody with the feel of a symphony orchestra behind the sound Mary Jones had created, maximizing that empty space.
And by distinguishing it from the vocal sections, he filled the empty spaces where the techno sound poured out completely with choreography.
The result?
-No, when I listened to the album it was cheerful, but the stage is ridiculously excitingㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Hey, now that I’m listening closely, doesn’t the drum kit sound a bit different???
-I imagined some frivolous dance moves, but this is freaking coolㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
The public was satisfied.
-This is what a country should be...!
-Every time Ion’s face gets caught on camera, I stop breathing.
-How are even the angles of their coats perfectly matched?
-It’s completely different from what my lowly imagination expectedㅎㅎ But I love it so muchㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎ
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋ Only Sion is wearing black sunglasses againㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Definitely a Confucian boyㅋㅋㅋㅋ
The fandom was satisfied as well.
As a behind-the-scenes story, Mary Jones had initially disliked the fact that Han Sion had attached a symphony orchestra behind her music.
She said it was too different from the essence of techno that she pursued.
But a few days later, a message had come.
-What did you do to me? The interlude of Pin Point keeps coming to mind. Did you put drugs into the section where it pours down from the symphony orchestra sound into the synthesizer?
Once the stage ended, posts poured into every community that had even the slightest point of contact with Sedalbaegil.
Naturally, that included talk about their No. 1 promise.
And then…….
[Sedalbaegil! Congratulations!]
[Congratulations!]
Sedalbaegil’s song took first place on a music show.