Taemin's Journey From Pretty Boy to Human Man
On his first comeback in two and a half years, Taemin seems to have figured out what he's always been divided over.
Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” arrived to the world in 2001, one of these eternally shimmering pop gems that gets better with each listen. Perhaps the most striking element of it, to this day, is Minogue’s breathlessness as she exalts the infatuation she has for a lover, juxtaposed against icy synths and drum loops. Her head is a place of pristine white, the inside of a computer, the clean surface of a Mac, and the only program that runs – its operating system – is the infatuation. Minogue’s “La la la”s are girlish, but removed, almost robotic.
When Taemin interpolated this classic twenty years later for “Criminal”, the “la la la” becomes an incantation, a beckoning. Taemin is removed, too, but wherever he is – with those cold synths and far-off bass – is a place that is decidedly dark, but not fully black. It is as barren as an OS, but it is not as plasticky. I hear the sonic equivalent of giant, empty halls that have no use except for weekly bazaars. It is not a place one would like to be at night, lit only by fires set in the trash, where creatures could come out: not people on the brink of poverty, perhaps with a penchant of the violent, but actual creatures that may be human-shaped but are most certainly not. It is in that synth that lashes like a whip, the cascading arpeggios in the chorus, in Taemin’s breathy, ever-distant falsetto. But then it comes out, the human, the plea to be free, in the last chorus. It is a chilling piece of pop music. We do not ever get the sense he escapes from the creatures. We get the sense that the person calmly intoning “la la la” amidst vocal samples of police calls and journalists rushing to report an emergency is the same person that traps Taemin in the final chorus. We get the sense maybe Taeemin is both creature and human.
Throughout his solo career, Taemin has dealt in contrasts and contradictions. There’s catholic undertones in there – say, a devil and an angel – but not always: sometimes all that it is is a simple contrast of black and white (“Danger”, blue and yellow in “Day and Night”) or casual and formal clothing (“2 Kids”). There’s Kanye-style masks sometimes. But while plenty of idols have various costume changes, it’s as though Taemin inhabits a different person with them. There’s a Taemin that will be on in a way any performer is “on”, and then there will be a Taemin that is more on, so on that it registers to us as off; or he is actually “off”: absent, someplace nobody can reach him. These Taemins are forever entwined, within kissing distance but never meeting one another.
He will wear or be in chains and ropes, or wear clothing that has fringes, but it never strikes me with sexual want as it would have with, say, Wonho. Wonho will show a high-end car that doubles as his sexual drive; Taemin will show the same car within three shots completely wrecked. And the music isn’t sexy either; it uses strings or synths, ominous and sensual. These are songs that communicate, well, danger, yes, but also desire that veers to the desperate. They’re songs that communicate a certain kind of command with complete remove. They typically use a second vocal track, either with him in lower register (“WANT”, “Criminal”) or a female vocalist (“Drip Drop”, “Advice”). Only once has it cloaked Taemin in so much autotune (“Danger”) that it registers as robotic for most of the song. But even there: that singular vocal in the bridge: “You know everything, ooh baby yeah / You move me and control me again”
Since 2014, Taemin always seemed to communicate that this divide was meant to convey something that images and speech couldn’t. The rigid dancing versus the dramatic singing. Good versus bad. He is divided, but over what? The manifestation of these divisions – on and more on, on and off – were only striking insofar as they seem irreconcilable, be it on set, the different cameras used, or with the way Taemin carries himself. But good and evil only seems irreconcilable in teenage years; Taemin carried it at least until his late twenties, even splitting his last album before enlistment into two: Never Gonna Dance Again. But as the final comeback of the enlistment, Taemin released “Advice”, a song that shows an unmasked and unhinged and masked and even more unhinged Taemin. He crashes a car because he can. He will stand in the plains, arms stretched out, white paint looking like bird shit, and look like the messiah he’s praised in IDEA only a couple months before.
The thought that maybe Taemin is against the idol industry writ large, or what it makes of the people that work in them, is a proposition that makes sense at the beginning. After all, he wouldn’t be the only one within his group to do so — that teammate Jonghyun’s music came out from the label and the system it did seems nothing short of a minor miracle sometimes. (“Pretty Boy” is about idols versus fans/the public, essentially.) But what Taemin is doing on his titles, from music video to music video, seems too elaborate, too ornate for that. This is personal, even if he can’t say what it is, both in the sense of him not knowing what it is and hiding it from the world. Two and a half years later, he’s back with “Guilty”, and what I see and hear here is a man who now knows the answer to what he wants to express. Here is a man who knows that good and bad has existed in him, as one, and always will — and that there’s trauma underneath all of it.
Before we reach to “Guilty”, I must highlight the Jonghyun-penned and Kai-assisted “Pretty Boy” from Taemin’s debut ACE. Taemin sounds positively aggressive in this one as he shouts the title over and over, a palpable force in the chorus especially. The brass gives the song a militaristic slant. “I may seem nice and I may seem soft, but that’s all a part of your imagination that’s over my head,“ he belts: a declaration of identity. On a Blue Night episode just before ACE was released, Jonghyun sounds especially warm talking about it: “It’s a song I like because I wrote it.” (You and me both.) He asked Taemin what he’d like to tell the world, and packaged it into a song. Rumors, interference, worry – all these things surrounded him, and all these things he wanted to escape. Jonghyun is bothered by how Taemin is seen – delicate, girly – and what he sees: a man (“a real man”, he says with a laugh) with perseverance.
The delicate and girly stereotypes essentially boil down to physique; Taemin debuted at just fourteen in SHINee and famously had no singing lines on “Replay”. But he could dance with hardness and fluidity both, features oft-mimicked but never surpassed even fifteen years later. In 2010, he’s worn his hair very, very long for SHINee’s “Lucifer”, and then again two years later in “Sherlock”, hiding his eyes and making his dainty frame look even more dainty. He’s always smiley. He’s not muscly. If you’ve stuck around in RPS shipper circles enough, or are plain fujoshi, you know what you see: a bottom, a submissive, an uke. (And Internet War? Jonghyun’s hand on Taemin’s head, pulling him in? You already know.) If you have preconceived notions about what maketh “man”, Taemin registers as someone outside of these lines, whether one chooses to call it “gay” or “girlish”.
You can see Taemin’s acceptance and also rebuttal of this image over his solo career. “MOVE” had him embrace his feminine side, but it was impressive not because Taemin swayed his body just so and was constantly in rain, but because it was juxtaposed with shots where Taemin is surrounded by women, looking stereotypically masculine. Taemin blows up smoke and he is seen with a reverse cross in “WANT”, but he also dances in front of his own photograph that he never looks at.
Mostly, he wants the camera on him dancing. Watching his videos, I always get the sense what he wants is to only dance, without any burden. His Japanese music videos get at that best, as does “Drip Drop”. In the latter, the only part that allows him to really sing his heart out is ironically the same moment where he sings: “We’re dancing”, each syllable in the original Korean hefty.
“Guilty” concedes that this could never happen. For a change, the song itself doesn’t sound detached from the vocal takes. It’s as dramatic as Taemin’s vocals are in his best songs. There are Biblical allusions in this one again – guilt, yes, as well as the final judgement, and who can forget the apple that he asks the other person to bite into? – but the song hides its pure idea of loving someone else and packages it with evil that he is not beckoned into this time, but beckons himself. Taemin sounds at home both when he yearns for the guilt and crime of loving the other person and when he asks the other person to lose themselves to make the love easy. His vocals are soaring higher than ever before, and the control and wicked ease that permeates “Advice” is all over this one too.
The music video, though, cinches things for good. He sports longer hair, reminiscent of the “Lucifer” and “Sherlock” eras, healthy biceps, and long jean skirts. It is not necessarily girlish, but uniquely Taemin. Following a trailer in which there was a vague Battle Royale-feeling to it, in which Taemin is at a boarding school that facilitates violence, the music video and the choreography goes a step further – all the evil that Taemin has seen battle within him, as evidenced by the hand that crawls up inside of his shirt, caressing, controlling his jaw. He sees other people pull at him, but then they’re gone, and his hand is still moving to his neck, as if he was trying to kill himself. And in the second verse, he is killing others, sporting a crown of feathers, far too fashionable to be made by one person and yet looking like a child’s attempt to crown himself king. In a crucial bridge, we see Taemin with an inhaler, clinging on a knee so he mustn’t partake in the violence he sees. With his high note entering the final chorus, he is setting everything on fire. The violence is cyclical. Again, he is the person that crashes the car. He is the king of the battlefield.
The pretty boy has grown up, and he’s taken in all that the world has taught him. He is in an empty hall that has one use at most. Lit by fires coming from trashcans, there are creatures lurking about. That is the realm that Taemin commands as his own. He’s done dividing himself trying to explain — creating, in the process, pop masterpieces of his own.
elif this was such a great piece!!!