Damn Idol Chapter 34
There were many things that made me anxious.
The dizzying realization that, despite all my efforts, I hadn’t surpassed 200 million copies—let alone 50 million.
The suffocating frustration of having nowhere I could confide my true story.
The emptiness of knowing that, though I had worked like a madman and achieved great success, everything would end up as nothing anyway.
And more than anything, what tormented me was cognitive dissonance.
I couldn’t tell whether I really was Han Sion, or whether I was just a lunatic lost in delusions.
Panic disorder and depression born from countless causes tormented me, and at some point, I began living in a haze of medication.
Even in that state, only my spite and obsession over album sales remained, so I fought with staff almost every day and clashed with management.
As an aside, Koreans didn’t like me much back then.
No, they hated me.
Because in my attempt to sell even one more album, I went around shouting “I love Japan” and got called a traitor to my country.
That was how badly I wanted to sell even one more album at the time.
Without even that kind of achievement, I couldn’t get through each day, so I even asked management to report the album sales to me every single day.
Depending on those numbers, I would be elated like a manic patient, then become miserable like a depressive one.
When that fiercely fought fifth life ended in failure, the thought suddenly occurred to me that I wanted to run away.
I didn’t want to decide success or failure with my own hands. I wanted to leave it to someone else.
So, in my sixth life, I decided to become an idol.
Looking back, I don’t think I liked idols very much in my first life.
There was no particular reason. I was just an ignorant punk afflicted with Hongdae syndrome and hipster syndrome.
But by my sixth life, I no longer felt that way.
Besides, if I succeeded as an idol, wouldn’t I be able to take Korea, Japan, China, and even Southeast Asia?
And so, after two years as a trainee, I debuted as the leader and main vocalist of a team called For The Youth.
The team became successful at once.
The debut title track I pushed for reached number one on the music charts in no time, and the follow-up song I composed reached number one on all three major broadcasters.
After every song I touched became a success, the company began looking at me differently.
They treated me not just as the leader of an idol group, but as an artist with genius-level instincts.
I was even able to pursue solo activities as much as I wanted.
But success was brief.
Discord soon arose.
I don’t remember clearly what sparked it.
It might have been my solo activities, or it might have been the year-end Gayo Daejeon.
It was a very old memory, and I had also tried hard to forget it.
At first, I had gotten along well with the members of For The Youth, so I made efforts to eliminate the discord.
I even split the income I earned from solo activities equally among N people, and I fought the company to guarantee the members’ individual activities.
Even so, the discord only deepened.
No matter how hard I tried, people hated me.
And they said it was all my fault.
Because I staked everything on solo activities rather than team activities, because I pushed ahead without consideration for my teammates, because as a genius I looked down on those without talent.
Even the fans said that.
In the end, For The Youth proceeded toward disbandment.
But surprisingly, I did not regress at that moment.
For The Youth had disbanded, but I, Zion, the team’s leader and main vocalist, still had many fans.
There was a time when my image worsened for a while, but once For The Youth actually disbanded and I was the only one left in the entertainment industry, my image quickly recovered.
After that, I made a solo comeback and continued successful promotions, then began selling albums while targeting the Japanese and Chinese markets.
The time I regressed was about three years after the team had disbanded.
It began one day when the members, who had terminated their contracts with the agency after the team disbanded and become ordinary civilians, wanted to meet me.
They offered me an apology.
They said that back then, they had been blinded by jealousy and had suffered too much.
That seeing me do well made them happy, but also made them miss me.
They asked whether we couldn’t reunite.
They asked me to consider it, if only for the fans waiting for the complete For The Youth lineup.
If it were now, I would have snorted at the suggestion.
No, to begin with, I wouldn’t have let things reach that point.
But back then, my feelings were much softer than they are now.
Foolishly soft enough to be hurt by people.
It was also a period when I was feeling the limits of being a solo artist because my album sales were gradually declining.
So I accepted the members’ apologies and decided to prepare for a comeback as the full lineup.
But in the end, the full lineup failed to materialize because of one contract condition.
[Income earned through solo activities will be split equally among N people.]
It had been a desperate measure I proposed to prevent the team from disbanding.
They demanded that again, and I was not enough of a fool to accept a demand whose intentions were so obvious.
And so, the members of For The Youth spat on me once more and left.
When I opened my eyes…
Wee-woo, wee-woo.
—I was at the intersection.
After that, I became much colder.
I’m not sure whether it was because my first attempt at team activities had ended in failure, or because I had seen their ugly sides.
So in my seventh life, I chose For The Youth once again.
I wanted to run an experiment.
I wanted to see how they would change if I treated them not with warmth, but according to the logic of capitalism and business.
The second For The Youth’s road to success was faster than the first, and the plane reached a higher altitude.
But the result was the same.
“Hyung, you’d already branded us as sons of bitches. Did you think we couldn’t feel that?”
“You really are a selfish bastard.”
“Did it piss you off that much that bastards like us were scraping a bit of rice stuck to a genius’s spatula?”
Maybe someone’s words were right.
Maybe, in my seventh life, our destruction was because of me.
But whatever the case, it didn’t matter.
Because after that, I headed to America and achieved even greater success.
All while distrusting and suspecting my teammates for a very long time.
In that sense, GOTM was a special team to me.
Because when I was with GOTM, my heart was fairly at ease.
I had thought I had forgotten all about For The Youth.
It was such an old matter, and strictly speaking, it was something that had never happened in this world.
But.
“I’m Fade of Take Scene. I look forward to working with you.”
Seeing the face of one of For The Youth’s members inevitably made the emotions from back then creep back up.
* * *
Why was Jo Yongseong here?
He was supposed to debut as For The Youth two years later, wasn’t he?
I had never spotted Jo Yongseong when I monitored Take Scene’s YouTube either.
I was confused for a moment, but I quickly found the answer.
I had once heard that before Jo Yongseong debuted in For The Youth, he had been in another debut lineup.
That debut lineup was Take Scene.
Of course, in my memories, Jo Yongseong had never debuted as Take Scene.
But these were merely memories from seven lives.
After I left for America, I hadn’t paid any attention to Korea.
Perhaps there had been a time, somewhere in between, when Jo Yongseong debuted with Take Scene.
When you regress countless times, unfamiliar situations occasionally occur.
Even if the same thing happens ten times, the eleventh time can produce a different result for no reason at all.
It could be because of a sudden change of heart, or it could be the butterfly effect caused by me.
Whatever it was, it didn’t matter.
There was no need to take revenge on Jo Yongseong now, nor any need to burn with emotion.
In this life, that bastard would be seeing me for the first time, so feeling anything here would only be ridiculous.
However, it did give me the motivation to do my best.
Once the broadcast ended, Take Scene’s debut was already a foregone conclusion.
No matter how well I did, according to the logic of capitalism, there was no way Sedalbaegil would debut.
But I hoped the people who watched this program would say this.
That Han Sion should have debuted with Take Scene instead of Jo Yongseong.
I knew it was childish, but what did it matter?
A worn-out regressor who could regress at the slightest misstep had to move forward by forcing himself to create motivation.
This much was motivation enough.
Just then, a staff member approached and began explaining the situation to me and Jo Yongseong.
They had picked a song that overlapped in our list of favorite songs, had us sing the same song, and the fifty audience members who heard it had finished voting.
I hadn’t heard Jo Yongseong’s song…
No, I should call him Fade from now on.
I might make a mistake otherwise.
Anyway, I hadn’t heard Fade’s singing, and Fade hadn’t heard mine either.
Maybe that was why Fade was smiling brightly, staring only at the monitor where the voting results would appear.
And the result that came out was—
Sedalbaegil
-Han Sion: 41 votes
Take Scene
-Fade: 9 votes
It made Fade’s face collapse in an instant.
Hmm. But who exactly were those nine people with tin ears?
It was me against Fade, and they could vote for Fade?
They had to be his relatives.
Anyway, seeing Fade’s face rot like that put me in a good mood.
That bastard had been the worst of For The Youth, the one who always attacked me.
Of course, I wasn’t enough of an amateur to show those feelings on broadcast.
“Ah…”
I acted a little, pretending to be flustered by such an overwhelming victory and glancing at Fade’s reaction, then bowed to the audience and headed over to my members.
When I sat down, Lee Ion whispered in my ear.
“It’s two to two so far.”
“The score?”
“Yeah.”
I had assumed On Saemiro would naturally have won, but judging from his ashen face, it seemed that wasn’t the case.
Since the order they were seated in was the order they sang…
He must have gone up against Juyeon.
I didn’t know how skilled Juyeon was at this point, but it would have been hard for On Saemiro to beat him.
I remembered that kid being really good at singing.
Still, I don’t think the gap would have been as big as the one between me and Fade.
While I watched the Take Scene members console Fade, it became Choi Jaeseong’s turn, the last in the order.
Sedalbaegil
-Choi Jaeseong
Take Scene
-Eye Level
I didn’t particularly care whether the Sedalbaegil team won, but I was a bit curious how Choi Jaeseong would sing.
How would the result of my advice to deliberately break the balance play out?
-Woo, tonight!
And so, I started listening with great interest…
Only to see a result I hadn’t expected at all.
Was Choi Jaeseong singing worse than usual?
No.
Then was he singing better than usual?
That wasn’t it either.
It was just the same.
Even though he was singing a song that clearly had breathing points every half measure without resting for an entire measure at a time, there was no significant difference.
His breath was really long.
At that level, it had to be innate.
Had Coming Up Next perhaps stolen away a talent who should have become a swimmer or challenged the Guinness record for holding his breath underwater?
-A just-right feeling, a cool breeze
Still, if I had to compare, the version where he used longer breaths was better to listen to.
Choi Jaeseong had a flaw where his emotional line shifted slightly with each measure, but that was gone now.
It was a subtle difference, but in any case, my advice had been correct, so I decided to be satisfied.
The result was a victory for Choi Jaeseong, who earned 28 votes.
Sedalbaegil had defeated Take Scene, 3 to 2.