@krakowskie-puchi / krakowskie-puchi.tumblr.com
At Mount fuji
Forget the rest of the fireworks around the world, these are the best. HNY.
The finale HOLY SHIT!!!
This is actually the first time I was impressed by a firework
For anyone interested, the music is by a composer named Thomas Bergersen, and the piece playing is called Homecoming from his Illusions album. I listen to his music whenever I need to be inspired to write.
SuperM: We Are The Future in London // Taemin, Kai and Baekhyun forcing each other to say ‘i love you’ in a cute way during the final ment
The thing is, Taemin may have a sweet smile and sweater paws and hold water in his mouth like a puffer fish and be uwu baby cute, but he is still a highly respected artist who has been in his respective industry for almost 12 years. He is one of the top artists in Korea, and he is probably a household name. He is someone who deserves respect when he is being interviewed, no matter where that interview is happening. Any interviewer worth their degree would take him seriously when he speaks to them. Especially about kpop. And besides all that, he is still a grown ass man. He should be treated like an adult. The same could be said for EXO. Even NCT, who have been busting their asses to be respected and make it in America and China. They all deserve to be taken seriously.
That's what's so frustrating about that LA Times piece, and pieces like it. They don't respect the members, and they don't take them seriously. They come in with an agenda and don't care about what the guys have to say. And SuperM isn't full of idiots. They can read a room. They probably know damn well when these ppl don't actually give a fuck abt what they have to say.
And that sucks. I feel bad that they have to deal with that.
I remember a few weeks ago on shawol twt, someone had retweeted a video of Jonghyun doing one of his sexier songs, like Moon or Cocktail or smth and commented “jonghyun cock” on it as a joke, and a non-shawol got mad at them bc they felt like that was disrespectful to speak of the dead like that.
Shawol twt promptly lost their damn MINDS abt it, and prececded to get the man trending by tweeting abt how sexy he and his music was, and the whole thing remains the funniest shit I’ve ever seen in my life bc shawols are funny as fuck and petty as hell when u really get them going.
But what was really fascinating, was the underlying point buried underneath all the crass comments and jjong fancams. Which is Shawols insistence that people stop telling them how they should interact with him and his legacy.
I’ve made no secret of it on this blog that I hate what I used call “hollywood bullshit” but now simply call “idol bullshit”. The crux of my soap box is this: Hollywood romanticizes celebrities who died young, especially of overdose, accidents, or suicide, so that it doesn’t have to take responsibility for the role the Hollywood system played in their deaths. A few examples would be the 27 club, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and River Phoenix. I’ve been passionate abt this for a long time.
But the thing abt the people I focus on, like River, is that they have been dead for 20+ years. Their legacy is settled, and in some ways there’s nothing more tragic. They are remembered for dying young, because that’s what Hollywood chose to focus on. People remember tragedy. It’s often the only thing people know about them.
So, from an objective standpoint, it has been very interesting to watch that battle over legacy play out in real time. I remember when the news broke about Jonghyun, and how I saw him trending on Tumblr and clicked on it. I read abt how a guy from SHINee had died, and although I was not into kpop, I had a very very good friend who was. I immediately contacted her, because I had remembered her talking at length about SHINee. And I scrolled through the tag. I read articles. I posted on Facebook, even, “another bright young thing dead at 27, when will we learn?”
But even then, Shawols were taking control of the narrative. I remember y’all saying that ppl shouldn’t talk like he kept it all inside and nobody knew. He spoke openly about his mental health, y’all insisted, he was a real advocate for things that mattered. He wasn’t sad all the time.
And when they did the concert in February. God. The images and gifs of SHINee dressed in white, flanking that microphone, will haunt me until the day I die. That was over a year before I got into SHINee. I got into them, finally, this August.
And what I found here, and what I’ve observed, has really changed the way I interact with celebrities who die young. It made me realize that I, too, was focusing on the wrong things. To y’all, he is still very much with us, and you talk about everything but his death. SHINee really is still five, because you haven’t let him become a tragedy. You talk about the vast diversity of his music, his talents and skills, his words and his love. The way he loved you, the way he loved his members and family, the way he loved Roo. Like all of us, Jonghyun was more than one thing, and Shawols have worked hard to keep him alive in your hearts as the wonderfully complex human being that he was. And every time people try to reduce him to just that one day, you fight for him. You refuse to let people turn him into tragedy porn. You stand up for his legacy and say, No. Here’s who Jonghyun was, and it is more than just that one moment.
I have never seen or heard of anything like it. It’s beautiful. And it’s what he deserves.
this is shinee 5 and we’re right by your side ☆
X™, Sekaide Ichiban Aishitahito
Children of The Night Otzarreta Forest, Basque Country, Spain
i was rlly thinking about shinee’s The Story of Light album today (but mostly Good Evening) and how it’s such an unconventional expression of mourning.
like normally when we think of mourning in music/art it’s with the expectancy of angsty music, of lyrics about missing someone, or of wanting to remember them, of bittersweetly recognizing that you’ll see them again (depending on what u believe), or about the unfairness of having this person taken from you too soon, or too cruelly, or at all
The Story of Light is a pop album. sometimes they sing about what it feels like to love a girl, to want to dig a space in someone’s heart, to wonder if a touch from someone could be so electric you explode. life continues as usual.
but sometimes that wall will crumble and we’re left with songs like Drive and Our Page and Good Evening. oh man, Good Evening. a song about morning that isn’t so much about mourning and more about wanting to reach out and finally find what you’ve been looking for. i know death is synonymous with loss, but shinee describing losing somebody like they’re something you can actually find again is not only uncomfortably eerie but really forces you to awknowlege the reprocussions of loss, of how running around trying to get back something irreplaceable that you’ve lost will in turn, cause you to lose yourself.
you feel loss in every aspect of Good Evening - the feeling that something’s missing in the mix, which is too vast and too sparse. in the dance, where shinee, idols with ten years of experience and known for their difficult choreography, stand on stage unnmoving for almost the entirety of the song (what’s wrong, the music’s started already, did they miss their cue, what’s wrong, why won’t they move?). when they don’t stand they sit, like a visitor in the waiting room, waiting, waiting, waiting, leaning on each other, waiting, and when they’re tired of waiting they will stand again. they’ll shuffle the chairs around. they’ll sit back down. they’ll stand back up. it’s an endless cycle and they’ve never looked more lost on stage. and although this song should be the easiest out of their whole discography to learn because of how simple the dance is and how relaxed the notes throughout the song are to hit, i imagine it’s one of their most difficult songs to perform.
and of course, there’s loss in the singing, where you’re listening, waiting, waiting, waiting to hear that one missing voice. all fifteen tracks are spent looking for that lost light the album promises you is still there - if you give yourself a moment to stand, to ponder, to breathe, to remember, to search through a memory, you will surely find what you are looking for, if just for a moment.
