Chapter 43
That morning, I never would have imagined the song would arrive in just two days.
At least the monthly evaluation was over.
The various schedules, like practice and management, were still going on as usual.
But our daily lives continued in a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere,
and I was getting ready to make crab rice bowls as a special treat for the girls, who always worked so hard.
First, I made a sauce with soy sauce, mirin, water, allulose, and various other seasonings.
“Whew. This isn't easy.”
I wasn't going to give them frozen crab meat or anything.
I wanted to feed them something a little better.
So I went to the market early that morning and picked the meat out of the snow crabs I'd had steamed.
Since each crab cost a pretty penny, I scraped every last bit of meat from the corners, then sautéed it with onions as I waited for the right moment to add the rice and sauce.
“Wow. That smells great.”
“Seriously! Even my dad wouldn't make this for me. You're the best, Team Leader!”
“I could eat your cooking for the rest of my life.”
“It does smell good.”
Led by Seong Se-ri, who seemed drunk despite not having had a drop to drink, the girls came rushing out.
“It'll be ready soon, so wait a bit.”
“Ah, Team Leader. Look at this.”
“What is it?”
I was carefully making crab rice bowls in the frying pan.
The girls each took their places, and then...
They turned around and started shaking their butts.
“We were together 24 hours a day. Appeal your body~♬”
“Men eat women.”
They even sang it live.
And they were good.
Quite apart from how well they did it...
‘Wouldn't their parents be crying tears of blood if they saw this?’
Even I felt a little uncomfortable watching, and I wasn't even their actual parent.
“I miss the butt you shoved in my face every morning.”
“What the hell kind of song is that?”
When I turned off the stove with an incredulous look on my face,
the girls answered.
“It's ‘Her Butt,’ the most-viewed song by the composer who's making our song. It got 120,000 views, by the way.”
“Still, the song itself wasn't bad.”
“The lyrics are pretty good, too. The beat's definitely unique, so I think it's got its own character.”
“Se-ri unnie said you'd like it if we showed you this, Team Leader.”
As they said that, they struck their poses again and stuck their butts out at me.
No.
They started twerking for real.
Honestly, it was amazing.
Four young idol hopefuls, wearing nothing but dolphin shorts, singing an adults-only song and twerking in front of me?
And even though the lyrics were a little lewd,
I couldn't deny that the song itself was good.
“Since we're going to be working with that composer anyway, we thought we should study their music in advance.”
“But when I listen to this song, I imagine the composer's girlfriend shaking her butt every morning.”
“It is kind of romantic.”
“I think it's nice. That sort of thing.”
I covered my mouth with one hand.
Maybe I was the one at fault.
Maybe I'd turned these girls into weirdos.
“Shake it up and down. Shake it, girl.”
“Is today a day off?”
“Yeah. So we're just going to hang out at the dorm doing this all day.”
By now the four of them were gathered around the dining table, clutching spoons and chopsticks in both hands and chirping like chicks waiting to be fed.
As I divided the same amount of fried rice among all four of them, I thought,
‘Should I change composers even now?’
Not to mention the showcase...
If they ended up on a music show and sang something like “Up and down, my hip, booby-booby,”
I'd already feel faint just thinking about it.
“Wow! This is so good.”
“Man. This would be incredible with a shot of soju.”
“Your cooking is the best, Team Leader.”
“Oh. This is pretty good.”
Unlike the girls, who weren't worried about anything, I ate my crab rice without even knowing whether it was going into my nose or my mouth, with STB's music on my mind.
“This person obviously has talent. Why do they insist on digging into such a niche field?”
Even if their most-viewed song had only gotten 120,000 views,
a quick search online showed that STB wasn't exactly a nobody.
As I'd said time and again, they were a pretty respected composer in the underground scene.
Their lewd lyrics were always drawing people's attention,
but the sound that only STB could create was truly one of a kind.
‘These days, it's getting harder to come up with new production processes. Most songs feel like they're made by tweaking and piecing together existing beats.’
Even in an era like this, creating something new all on their own was impressive.
‘With that kind of talent, fucking make something mainstream.’
This is K-pop, for God's sake!
I considered calling them to persuade them to go in that direction, but ended up shaking my head.
Regardless of the success rate Nobel had shown me,
how much did I really know about composing?
I was just someone who understood, roughly, how this industry worked, including the planning side of things.
If I started telling the composer what to do, I'd only make them uncomfortable.
“Did you say today was a day off?”
I asked as I did the dishes.
The girls answered from the sofa, watching TV.
Hee-ju was beside me, neatly stacking the clean dishes on the shelf.
“It's a total day off. Rest time. Ah, maybe I'll have a drink. It'll all be out of my system by tomorrow anyway, right?”
“We don't have vocal or dance training, either. It's a day to recover our energy.”
“I guess I'll watch a drama.”
Each of them told me what they planned to do.
Last was Eun Hee-ju.
“It's a day for sex.”
There was one lewd little chick carefully tugging on my clothes.
“You do that all the time.”
“Today we're doing it more. It's a day off.”
Her eyes held the boundless trust of someone who didn't doubt for a second that I'd say yes.
“……All right. I'll do it once I'm done with the dishes.”
“Yes, Team Leader.”
That was the moment I accepted Hee-ju's offer.
“Ah, Team Leader. If you don't want to watch me drink, you can have me later, too.”
“I'll do it while watching a drama today.”
“Gasp! I'd be happy even if I'm last.”
[Do you know why people can't quit once they start gambling, Master?]
I had a pretty good idea, but I asked anyway.
What?
[Once you get a taste for it, you can't stop.]
[Just like these girls right now.]
[Hehe. Still, it's not boring to watch. I get to see you have sex with pretty girls nonstop.]
You crazy bitch.
I was cursing Nobel to myself when...
[An email has arrived.]
[From-STB]
“Huh? It's the composer.”
The first thing I felt when the email arrived was unease.
For one thing, I didn't think they could have finished a song in just two days.
Unless this person was an AI, how could they have finished composing and writing lyrics in two days?
But then...
[Hello, Team Leader Kim Hyun-woo. This is STB.]
When I opened the email after reading the subject line,
there was an encrypted file attached.
[Hello, Team Leader Kim Hyun-woo. This is STB.]
[I've completed one song, so I'm sending it to you first.]
[After you've all listened to it, please feel free to tell me if there are any parts you don't like or anything you'd definitely like me to change. I'll do my best to revise or improve it as quickly as possible.]
[I hope you and the girls have a wonderful day.]
I was already planning to take turns sleeping with the girls all day today.
But it felt like I needed to check this first.
“But how do I unlock this?”
When I clicked the file that had arrived,
[This file can only be used with the administrator's permission.]
was the message that popped up.
And then...
[Verified.]
[Download complete.]
No sooner had I checked the email than another one arrived, saying the file had been approved.
That meant someone on the other end had checked whether I'd received the email and approved it right away.
‘What kind of person is this?’
First of all, I was surprised that they'd made a song in just two days.
But I wasn't happy about it at all.
It was a song made in two days.
“Are they trying to get paid for nothing?”
It was human nature to expect a good result only after a lot of time had been invested.
“Shake your butt up and down?”
“Stop. If it's that song, I'm rejecting it outright.”
If it really was a lewd song that made me feel like I had to put the girls in bikinis and send them onstage,
I'd reject it outright, success rate or no success rate.
But then...
[Song Title-Radiance]
Radiance?
“Hmm. At least the title has a nice ring to it.”
Titles like this were popular these days, so I kind of liked it.
As K-pop spread around the world, it had become common to use English titles packed with meaning.
[Radiance means ‘light.’ I told you that day, didn't I? I said I felt like I'd seen a light.]
There was a text file included with the song, explaining and interpreting Radiance.
[Of course, 'light' means much the same thing, but the feeling is a little different. Radiance is a light that holds happiness within it. It has warmth, too. This song holds everything from my surprise at the time to the emotion I felt.]
I guess we'd find out when we listened.
“Da-young. You need to evaluate this objectively.”
Of our members, Lee Da-young had the sharpest eye.
“Well, I can't say my ears are the best, but I'll do my best.”
We gathered in the living room and played the song Kim Gi-bok had sent us on the laptop.
-♪♬♪♬
“……”
I was a little surprised as soon as the song started playing.
The pleasant, light beat kicked off, and the lyrics came in less than two seconds later.
It was a really good opening for Eun Hee-ju.
“Their singing is terrible.”
“Well. They're a composer, after all.”
Since they'd made the song in two days, they probably hadn't had time to find someone to sing it as a ‘demo singer’ before handing it over to an actual vocalist.
Or maybe they wanted to sing it themselves to show us.
“The start feels intense, but also kind of calm.”
That was right.
It was like Hee-ju's personality itself.
There was a calmness and uniqueness to her, as if she wouldn't waver even if the devil stabbed her in the heart right before her eyes.
Next came a rap that was the very best of what popular music had to offer.
I guess this was what you got from an underground composer.
The quality of the rap was on another level.
“This part seems like Da-young's.”
Since Da-young and Seong Se-ri were the rappers in our group,
one of the two of them had to rap it.
Just as Se-ri said, it seemed like this rap had been made with Da-young in mind.
It was an easy rap to perform if you had the meticulousness for it.
After that came the repeated highlight section no K-pop song could do without.
It felt like a hook dropped in, and then a rhythm that seemed to pour out light started playing.
One of a kind.
Amazing.
“……”
To be honest, the song was only 2 minutes and 43 seconds long—not long at all.
So you might think that was why they'd managed to make it in two days, but...
In my opinion, time wasn't the issue.
At 2 minutes and 43 seconds, it was actually the perfect length for today's busy society.
The difficulty level was pretty high, with high notes, rap, and highlights coming one after another without a break.
Our girls could handle it without much trouble,
but even so, it was difficult enough that they'd need to practice a lot to pull it off.
People often said that certain famous ballads seemed to have been made for just one singer to perform.
This was exactly the kind of song you could say had been made for only our group to sing.
‘We can do it.’
On top of that, it was one of a kind and original,
while also being incredibly mainstream.
It was so mainstream that anyone who knew STB from the underground scene would never guess it was by the same person.
That was the biggest reason this song was a hit.
“Da-young. What do you think?”
She was a little picky,
had a nasty personality,
and had a foul mouth,
but Da-young, who always found our problems and asked us to fix them, even the ones I thought were already perfect, said something I never would have expected.
“This... doesn’t need any revisions?”