Damn Idol Episode 77
* * *
The first thought that came to mind was, "Is this a shoot?"
Because if it wasn't, there would be no way the members of Sedalbaegil could have known about my parents' hospital room.
But if that were the case, there were no cameras following them, nor any mounted cameras.
As if guessing my question, Iion opened his mouth.
"At the restaurant, I asked the mentor if he could contact the production team and find out for us."
"……When I went to the restroom?"
"Yeah."
I see.
So that's why they changed the subject as soon as I showed up.
I understood the situation.
But…….
I couldn't understand them.
We had already reached our end.
I was going to debut with Take Scene, and they were going to stay at Lion.
Staying at Lion didn't mean we would be together forever.
Someone could fall from Lion's debut group, and someone else could receive a love call from another agency and leave.
So there was no reason to go this far.
Then, Onsaemiro played music from his phone.
"Come to think of it, I thought your song might have already reached the hospital room."
Gu Taehwan took over from Iion.
"Wouldn't it be better to let them hear the new song in advance?"
Thanks to Onsaemiro, I had composed it. Choe Jaeseong had set the genre. Gu Taehwan had requested the intro. Iion would take charge of the pre-hook.
The song I had created.
It was a small song.
Too quiet to even fill the hospital room.
Someone started a small hum.
Eventually, the members excluding me began to hum their own parts.
♬♪♪♪♪♪~ Amidst that singing.
The sound of my parents' heart monitors blended in.
The humidifier hummed.
Birds chirped outside the window.
The early summer breeze knocked on the window.
Along with my sobs.
* * *
The day before the final round, Eddie came to see me.
"Hey, I heard it's the last one already?"
"It feels like it's been quite a while to say 'already.'"
"I listened to the song you sent. Se-dal-baeg-il?"
I snorted at Eddie's clumsy Korean pronunciation.
"So, what's the verdict?"
"It was a good song. Aside from thinking deep house might have been better."
"This works better in K-pop."
"Oh, right. Did you know Alex came back looking absolutely dumbfounded?"
Chris Edward's manager, Alex, had recently offered me a contract with a confident look on his face.
He said he had been watching me the whole time and was convinced he absolutely couldn't let me slip away, and that he had persuaded the headquarters.
"This amount of a signing bonus is truly outrageous."
It wasn't a lie.
It was an amount you couldn't imagine offering an unknown singer from Asia.
It was the kind of contract that fairly successful local singers in a state might receive.
But I refused.
Because my goal wasn't the Billboard.
Alex was utterly dumbfounded.
He said he had only worried about how much to invest, never imagining I'd refuse the investment altogether.
Still, Alex didn't give up and told me to look him up if I ever made my way to America.
Well, who knows.
If you're breaking into America, it's easier to have a distributor.
"But didn't I clearly tell you? I have no intention of signing."
"Managers interpret that like this: not enough money!"
"Well, not entirely wrong. Anyway, safe travels."
Eddie and I shook hands with a smile.
He had a big shot with HBO scheduled, so he had to return to America, and while he was at it, he said he'd look into the musicians I'd introduced him to.
For the record, Eddie knows everything that's been happening on Coming Up Next.
Just as I expected, when he was judging
Of course, that was out of the question.
Did they really think a Billboard number-one composer would meekly follow such a request?
Thanks to that, Eddie was returning after no-showing the remaining filming schedules.
Saying he didn't like it.
Well, I understand PD Gang Seoku's feelings too.
He's a businessman.
"Sion, let's definitely meet in America."
"Yeah."
I thought that was our last goodbye, but Eddie, who had walked quite far away, came back.
"What? Did you forget something?"
"You're a little strange."
"You mean I feel familiar?"
"No, I mean it's strange that you're anxious."
"……?"
"A musician with talent like yours doesn't need to be anxious. Doesn't need to be scared, and doesn't need to calculate."
He continued.
"Just go for it. The public may seem indifferent at a glance, but they absolutely aren't. There are so many people in this world who will recognize the essence contained in your music. People like me."
I snorted and nodded at Eddie's words.
"Yeah."
Not being anxious is exactly why I can't sell 200 million albums in my life.
At best, I'd probably end with around 30 million.
But I didn't decorate our final moments with such a retort.
Because although we met in an absurd way, Eddie and I had somehow become friends again.
Another day passed.
And the morning of Coming Up Next's final competition, the
* * *
The 2,000 audience members began entering the venue.
A cable channel audition program.
And not only that, calling this many audience members for an in-house survival-format competition show was unprecedented.
If this had been brought up during the program's planning stage, they probably would have been criticized for being crazy.
But now, it was possible.
[Average viewership rating 8.4%]
[Capital region average 8.9%]
[Peak minute-by-minute rating 10.2%]
The ratings for episode 6 had been monstrous.
Moreover, the ratings were clearly on the rise.
Ordinary audition programs tend to lose steam toward the latter half because participants get eliminated.
If the participant you're rooting for gets eliminated, you don't want to watch anymore—that's the heart of a fan.
However, Coming Up Next had no eliminated contestants, so viewing inertia was strong.
Of course, saying only this might make elimination seem like a bad element, but quite the opposite.
Even knowing that some viewers will drop off, producing eliminated contestants every episode is necessary for tension.
Without anyone dropping out, there's no tension, and the motivation to watch the next episode is weak.
Simply put, it might not be fun.
But Coming Up Next had completely overcome this weakness.
Thanks to Han Sion.
Especially,
Among Coming Up Next's viewers, there were quite a lot of people who weren't interested in idols but liked Han Sion.
Particularly, male viewers in their 20s and 30s showed this tendency, because people who didn't watch idol content had been drawn to Coming Up Next.
They always wanted Han Sion's solo stages and hoped for higher-level missions.
In a sense, they were people who completely denied Coming Up Next's planning intention.
So if the first team battle, the
But Han Sion had captured them.
Because
Thanks to that, a reaction of "Huh? Team battles are fun too." formed, and the ratings didn't drop at all.
To the point that they could aim for the 10% summit with episode 7's ratings.
Against this backdrop, the production crew preparing for the final round was bustling.
"What about the banners and cheering slogans?"
"We've appropriately replaced or collected them."
"Good. We mustn't make it look like Take Scene is the only one being cheered for on screen or on site."
"I'll check again shortly."
In truth, among today's audience, there were more people from the type cheering for Take Scene.
Since the on-site vote would be reflected in the final results, the production crew had deliberately selected the audience.
In fact, internally, there had been talk that since the judges would push for it anyway, there was no need to screen the audience too.
They were worried that if it stood out too much, there would be backlash.
But PD Gang Seoku didn't think so.
Partly because of the Sedalbaegil stages he had seen so far, and partly because of the preparation process for the final round.
'It was chilling.'
The sight of Sedalbaegil gritting their teeth for two weeks under Han Sion's meticulous directing was truly chilling.
Because you could see them being sharpened day by day.
Honestly, he was almost regretful that he had to cut all of Sedalbaegil's team chemistry shots and focus solely on Han Sion.
"Everything's wrapped up!"
At the assistant director's shout, Gang Seoku snapped out of his thoughts.
Sentimentality was for later.
For now, he had to put the program to a close.
Besides…….
'Good kids.'
Thanks to Sedalbaegil, it seemed they could reach a beautiful ending.
And so, the curtain rose on the final show.
* * *
The prelude to the opening was, absurdly enough, a special stage by Blue—Choe Daeho, Yu Seonhwa, and Yi Changjun.
It was a stage mixed with Blue's ambition, because they had been somewhat stressed by the comments left all this time.
"-I don't know about the others, but does Blue even have the caliber to judge something like this?
"-I mean, compared to Blue's era, the current idol scene is insanely high-level;"
The stage was pretty good.
Blue and Yu Seonhwa showed off peak singing ability, while Choe Daeho and Yi Changjun handled the humor.
The audience burst into laughter at the sight of them pushing the rap parts onto each other.
After the performance, the four of them smiled and sat in the judges' seats, grabbing their mics.
"-Ah, it really isn't easy. Preparing for this stage, I was newly reminded of how hard our contestants must have worked."
"-Judge Yu Seonhwa, what advice would you like to give to Judges Choe Daeho and Yi Changjun?"
At Blue's question, Yu Seonhwa snorted and grabbed the mic.
"-You'll have to be reborn."
The audience clapped and enjoyed the judges' voices ringing through the speakers.
After the refreshing atmosphere formed by the opening, a special stage was announced.
Usually, such special stages are put on by previously eliminated contestants.
But Coming Up Next has no eliminated contestants.
As the audience tilted their heads in confusion.
A duet performance was revealed, and cheers erupted.
- Gu Taehwan – Redi
Onsaemiro – Juyeon
Choe Jaeseong – Fade
Iion – Ssiyu
Han Sion – Eye Level
-However, beneath the surface.
"-Wow, brutal. So brutal. They're just shoving a direct comparison in our faces.
"-Except for Han Sion, it feels like Take Scene would win all of them, right?
"-Hahaha, Eye Level is so pitiful. Paired with Han Sion.
"-No, but they're doing this, and then doing another team battle too? Their breathing is going to suffer.
"-Looking at the song choices, it seems they minimized the choreography and are only doing a vocal battle.
"-It's not a battle, it's a duet!
"-How do you look at this as a pure duet;"
Around the time when residents of idol culture who had succeeded in their audience applications began sharing the situation on SNS and various forums.
Two men climbed onto the stage.
It was Gu Taehwan and Redi.
The song they sang was .
was a duet sung by a male rapper who had gained fame through variety shows and the main vocalist of the first-tier girl group Way from Flower.
As with most collaboration songs between a male rapper and a female vocalist, the rapper took the verses, and the vocalist took the chorus.
However, this song had an interesting element.
Namely, the lyrics.
The speakers of this song blame and criticize each other.
Of course, the emotion contained within was "I hate you so much, but I love you to death," but that was the original.
Gu Taehwan and Redi had agreed to express this emotion through competitiveness rather than a love-hate relationship.
To do that, they revised the lyrics and asked the mentor for permission.
Since the two were in agreement, the mentor nodded too.
But this was a board designed by Han Sion.
So that Gu Taehwan could beat Redi.