Damn Idol Chapter 68
As soon as I entered the studio, I turned off every camera the broadcasting station had set up.
It wasn’t as if I was about to say anything others shouldn’t hear, but there was no reason to leave this scene behind as reference footage, either.
“Don’t just stand there. Sit on the sofa.”
Onsaemiro sat down on the sofa without a word.
Seeing as he showed no particular reaction despite being dragged here so suddenly, he seemed to think none of this mattered one way or another.
To be honest, I didn’t care either.
But I did intend to correct a few of Onsaemiro’s misconceptions.
After turning off all the cameras, I dragged over the engineer’s chair and sat across from the sofa.
“Onsaemiro. You asked if you could beat me, right?”
“Right.”
“You can’t. That will never happen. Do you know why?”
“……
Because your talent is better?”
“That’s not wrong, but it’s not the answer.”
“Then?”
“Because you’re not the only one who can’t beat me.”
“Who else can’t?”
“Right now, in this world, anyone who’s making music.”
“…….”
Onsaemiro, who had been blinking slowly, let out a faint laugh.
He seemed dumbfounded.
“Is that supposed to comfort me?”
“No.”
This wasn’t comfort.
“It’s the truth.”
The cold, hard truth.
I didn’t care if Onsaemiro couldn’t overcome his despair and quit music, or if he retired after Coming Up Next.
But if the reason was “because he despaired over the talent of an idol trainee on the same team,” then that was wrong.
Because I wasn’t someone on merely that level.
So I intended to change that proposition to “because he despaired after seeing the most outstanding musician on Earth.”
I wasn’t born a genius.
But endless time had made me into one.
That was why I could be certain.
At present, there was no musician on this Earth with greater talent than me.
“Onsaemiro. Say anything.”
“What?”
“I said, literally anything. ‘Fade, you son of a bitch,’ works too.”
“……
Coming Up Next.”
I muttered the “Coming Up Next” that Onsaemiro had spat out a few times, then picked up the guitar.
“Watch closely. This is improvisation.”
Then I played the guitar.
Onsaemiro had ears too, so he would know.
That the rhythm and pitch of the utterly meaningless phrase he had just spoken with his own mouth were being turned into music as the main melody.
It should have been a pretty listenable performance.
“Again. Say anything.”
“……
Onsaemiro.”
“Should’ve had that kind of self-love sooner.”
This time, I played the bass following the syllables of Onsaemiro.
“I’ll play the keyboard however I want.”
I played the keyboard, and since I didn’t know how to play drums, I programmed them with a virtual instrument.
When I played the four sounds at once.
“……!”
I could feel Onsaemiro being startled.
No, but even I was a little surprised.
This is good, isn’t it?
“Composition complete. Took twenty-five minutes. I’ll arrange it as a pop song. Do you like PBR&B?”
“I don’t know what that is…….”
“You know The Weeknd?”
“I do.”
“That’s it.”
The Weeknd was the singer I had used as a role model when I first challenged the R&B scene. By around 2025, his official album sales would exceed two hundred million.
Of course, that was the RIAA tally, including unit sales and streaming sales.
It probably included EPs and compilation albums too.
By the demonic method that only counted physical albums, I figured it would be a bit over fifty million.
No, this wasn’t the time to be thinking about that.
If I started thinking about other singers’ album sales, I got too immersed.
I arranged the song in an instant.
It only took a long time to refine the sound; arranging itself was something I’d always done quickly.
As I arranged it, I also made the vocal line.
There was no time to write lyrics, so I brought over lyrics from a song I had sung in a round where I challenged R&B.
Then I sang.
With everything I had.
Surprise spread across Onsaemiro’s face.
Because it was probably better than any song I had sung on Coming Up Next so far.
Of course it was.
Mission songs had the restrictions of being missions, so you had to sing within a fixed framework.
By contrast, the song I was singing now had been made without restrictions.
Also, I was singing it alone.
To put it coldly, the team I wanted was one where there was no difference in quality between a song sung by “Han Sion” alone and a song sung by “the entire team.”
GOTM had been a group capable of that.
As soon as the song ended, I picked up the guitar again.
Then I began taking apart the melody of the song I had just sung and reconstructing it in various ways.
No, but this is seriously good.
It wasn’t as if I never made songs through luck, but it had been a long time since a song born by chance was this good.
Feeling better, I was excitedly playing the guitar when Onsaemiro made a slightly sickened expression.
Even if he didn’t know much about music, he would understand that I had just expressed the same melody in dozens of variations.
And he would also understand that I had taken those dozens of variations and broken them down again into dozens of measures, transforming them.
After that, I continued to immerse myself in the music work.
There was something I wanted to show Onsaemiro, and I also felt that I needed to properly work on this song.
When the fully reconstructed song was complete, I sent the lyrics to Onsaemiro by message.
“Try singing it.”
“Me?”
“The melody’s stuck in your ears, isn’t it? If I give you a bit of direction, you’ll be able to sing it right away.”
Onsaemiro hesitated, but when I played the beat for him, he began to sing.
“No. There, you need to drop the notes rhythmically.”
“Raise the pitch more. But raise it comfortably. Don’t tighten your resonance chamber.”
“Don’t think of the starting point of the sound as your throat. Think of it as the back of your head. The sound goes straight from the back of your head to between your eyebrows.”
No, but what is this?
I had braced myself to feel frustrated once I started directing him, but he followed along surprisingly well.
At this level, he had even more talent than I’d thought.
Why hadn’t I known?
“You’ve never learned singing? You were in agencies, even if you got cut.”
“Only for a really short time.”
“How short?”
“If it was long, two months. If it was short, fifteen days?”
“……”
Even a good trainer had their own methodology and color.
So if even the best trainer kept changing, that was a path to ruining a singer.
Come to think of it, during the Team B selection, he’d performed by imitating Under the Streetlamp, hadn’t he?
And during Seoul Town Funk, when I had guided him in detail, he had been pretty good.
In that case, Onsaemiro currently had no baseline.
No wonder his singing fluctuated so much whenever his mentality was affected.
Some more time passed after that, and Onsaemiro finished recording.
Since it wasn’t an album recording, there were parts we let slide, but there were also parts where I was surprised by his smoother-than-expected expression.
“Listen.”
And so I played the song Onsaemiro had recorded at full volume.
It was a good song, and good vocals.
But the guide version I had sung in one take was far better than the song Onsaemiro had sung with proper focus.
Even though the beat of the guide version was distinctly worse than the current version’s beat.
“Do you get it now?”
Onsaemiro nodded.
“I…… have talent too.”
What is he talking about?
This was where he was supposed to see my talent, not his own.
But because Onsaemiro suddenly started shedding tears, I couldn’t say what I wanted to say.
After a long while, Onsaemiro, having sorted out his emotions, opened his mouth.
“I understand what you mean.”
“…….”
I wasn’t sure whether he had truly understood properly.
But I was human too, so in this sort of atmosphere, I couldn’t say something like, “Yes, you’ll become unhappy if you compare yourself to a genius like me.”
Then Onsaemiro looked straight into my eyes and asked.
“With talent like this, isn’t everything so easy that it feels boring? What’s your goal?”
I thought about it for a moment, but decided to tell him the truth.
“Two hundred million albums sold.”
“Why that?”
“Because I had a dream. A dream where my parents woke up if I sold two hundred million.”
“…….”
“When I woke up from the dream, everything in this world felt false, but I had no choice but to believe in it.”
Onsaemiro was silent for a while, then nodded.
I didn’t know exactly what he was thinking.
But I could tell that he had washed away his despair.
When Coming Up Next ended, Sedalbaegil would disband, and when this round ended, I would regress.
But at the very least, it seemed Onsaemiro wouldn’t give up singing.
“And if I tell you one thing, Producer Gang Seokwoo probably won’t ask you to give him that money.”
“How do you know that?”
“Do you not know what an advance means? It’s money you receive ahead of time. Then where do you think he advanced it from?”
“……?”
This is kind of frustrating.
“I’m saying he advanced it from the future Onsaemiro. He thinks that even after Coming Up Next ends, you’ll be someone who continues appearing on M Show.”
“……!”
As if he really hadn’t known, Onsaemiro was startled.
“And do you think he just did that for nothing? It means that even if you become famous later and no longer need to appear on a broadcasting station on the level of M Show, you should remember your loyalty.”
It seemed Producer Gang Seokwoo had overestimated Onsaemiro’s political sense.
Well, Onsaemiro did have a face that looked somewhat calm.
“Besides, even if you split the PPL we’ve done so far into ten parts, that amount would be more than covered.”
On top of that, Onsaemiro was the type to eat quite well.
Even when we had pork belly in Myeongdong during the karaoke mission, he pulled off the feat of eating three to four servings by himself.
I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but thinking about it now, I understood why Onsaemiro always ate so much.
He simply hadn’t had many chances to eat food like that until now.
Humans were more subjective creatures than one might think, so they always measured the world according to their own standards.
That was why those who had lived in ordinary households couldn’t properly imagine someone else’s poverty.
Honestly, I didn’t really know either.
A life where a high school student had to give up all future value and devote himself only to part-time jobs just to survive.
But if there was one thing I had realized after living for a very long time, it was that rather than judging other people’s lives, you should accept them as they were.
Ah, but I really don’t understand Fade’s life.
“Come to think of it, Fade said he wanted to get a hold of my weakness together?”
If I get the chance next time, I’ll have to beat him up some more.
* * *
[Choe Jaeseong_Sedalbaegil_Observation Log]
It hadn’t been that long since Choe Jaeseong started writing an observation log about Sedalbaegil.
It was probably while they were preparing Seoul Town Funk.
When a hot-blooded nineteen-year-old youth was stuck in Pocheon, there was simply too little to do.
Of course, there was exhilaration from practice and the stage, but living twenty-four hours a day solely for that wasn’t easy.
So at first, he wrote a diary, but since the people he was with every day were Sedalbaegil, at some point it had turned into an observation log.
Now he was writing his observation log in quite a serious manner.
[Case_1]
[Ion hyung said something shameless again today. He wondered why everyone else seemed to be getting more and more handsome from camera massage, while he himself stayed the same.]
[I was staring at him in disbelief when Taehwan hyung calmly answered him. He said it was because Ion hyung had already reached the highest score.]
[You’d think he would deny it, but Ion hyung reacted with, “Ah, I see.”]
[He really is an incomprehensible hyung.]
[It’s not that he’s narcissistic, and he’s not trying to show off either. Rather, Ion hyung is in a very objective state.]
[Ah, is that why? Did he end up looking at his own face objectively?]
[Case_2]
[Since this morning, Sion hyung and Onsaemiro hyung have been acting a bit strange.]