“It Was Supposed To Be Major”: The Story of SHINee’s “View”
Credit: SM Entertainment
The song’s inspiration arguably came from a letter.
On January 15, 2015 a listener wrote to Blue Night, the radio program SHINee’s Jonghyun hosted nightly on MBC radio, to tell the MC about a condition called synesthesia. Jonghyun was fond of reading stories nightly on the air and this story in particular piqued his fascination. The listener described seeing the singer’s voice as the color gold, particularly when she would listen to Blue Night.
The letter, as transcribed by FYJjong, read:
“After listening to Blue Night every night, I've finally found the courage today to write in. i’m one listener (of many) who falls asleep with Jonghyun’s “come take a rest tomorrow too” farewell ending each night. To tell the truth, I have synesthesia. It's a disability that makes you visualize sound as a certain color. As a result, I find it difficult to go places where I can hear too many people’s voices, or too many noises.
When I walk the streets, I usually go around with my earphones plugged in, listening to a song I'm used to. But I still trip over often. It's become an old habit to close my eyes whenever I listen to music. In middle school, I first heard Jjong-d’s music through a recommendation from my sister. it seems like just yesterday when i first thought, “So, there are voices that look like autumn sunlight, too.” but now I’m about to graduate university, and i’ve moved to a quiet neighborhood where i’m listening to Blue Night now.
These days, I fall asleep watching a golden voice swaying and rippling from the radio. So, I wanted to say, thank you. I'm not sure how to conclude this. Every night during your farewell I would think, I hope you get some rest too, Jjong-d.”
“So you hear my voice in gold?” Jonghyun asked after he finished reading the letter. He understood that while this was an honor to hear, it must be a difficult condition to manage. To learn more, in a move the MC often made on air, he called the listener to hear more of her story.
Once on the phone, the writer identified herself as simply “J”, and told Jonghyun that his voice resembled, “an autumn day with really clear skies, (the color of) sunlight reflecting on the ground and sparkling.”
Jonghyun was touched. “I hope …. Your day will end glittering in gold,” he told J.
What she didn’t know was that this story would change the course of SHINee’s career.
Shortly after hearing the story of J, Jonghyun began to tinker with lyrics both for his own album and for SHInee’s comeback. He was a writer who enjoyed crafting his listener’s stories that he read nightly into inspiration for his own work. But he was also an idol, and he constantly searched for ways to innovate with his four groupmates. In 2015, at the time of this song’s release, SHINee was one of the most popular groups in K-Pop. Just a few years prior, they held their first concert at the massive Tokyo Dome on the wings of smash hits like “Lucifer”, “Ring Ding Dong”, and “Dream Girl.”
SHINee is made up of five idols who each contain their own unique style: Key (birth name Kim Ki-bum), known for his powerful voice and avant-garde fashion, Minho, popular for being the visual, rapper and also known for his acting, Onew (birth name Lee Jin-ki), the leader and lead vocalist, Taemin, the macknae who consistently improved every year, and finally Jonghyun, the writer and powerhouse vocalist who’s range was unmatched in the genre.
While Jonghyun had successfully advocated for his own songs to be included in previous SHINee releases, he was not the first writer of this song. “The lyrics for ‘View’ were not originally by Jonghyun,” Key revealed on the MMTG Show. “There was one [version] already made before he made the lyrics.”
Those lyrics, Minho said, “were about love.”
But after reading Jonghyun’s lyrics, Key remembered thinking, “This is it!” So he called SHINee’s creative director and asked, “Isn’t Jonghyun’s version much better?” And with that, SHINee was given a song with a fresh concept.
In an interview with Pops in Seoul Jonghyun confirmed the inspiration for “View” was the condition he learned about from J. “There was a concept I always wanted to write about,” Jonghyun said on location for the music video shoot in Thailand. “And it was synesthesia. For example, seeing the colors of sounds or feeling the weight of a scent. Everything came together well and it became the title track of our album.
As noted on the MMTG Show interview, “‘View' was unprecedented as an idol song.” The music was house and unlike typical K-Pop songs, had no clear structure to it. The song held more in common with the music playing in European nightclubs that summer than what was being made in Korea.
“It was so new,” Minho marveled when he thought of the track’s sound six years later.
“It was supposed to be major,” Key declared.
A hip, modern style for SHINee, image courtesy of SM Entertainment (and Key).
Taemin had his reservations though. “I was the opposite of the other members,” he said. “For me, I was scared to accept something new because that was a turning point for SHINee where there was a change in our style.”
The group’s sound wouldn’t be the only thing that would shift with “View’s” release: Their style would be radically different, too, thanks to Key who didn’t want the group styled in suits.
“Suits don’t go well with deep house music,” he claimed. “We went for something more raw while we were doing this.” Key was approved to style SHINee for the comeback and chose modern streetwear, which provoked harsh criticism of the group, specifically for Key wearing a jersey that said “GRL PWR” (stylized to read “Girl Power”). Jonghyun’s hair was also notable as a champagne gold color. This is important, I would like to point out, because it is similar to how the writer J described his voice. It was, she said, “The color of sunlight reflecting on the ground and sparkling. That kind of yellow.”
“The costumes were based on my ideas — a vintage, old-school [aesthetic] that might be new to our audience,” he wrote in an Allure magazine essay. “Other groups mostly wore uniforms. So our look for ‘View’ was shocking. I think a lot of people might not have liked it because our outfits were a bit too forward for the times, but I don't regret it.”
Other groups, Onew remembered, would wear custom-made outfits.
“We were the only ones who didn’t look so fierce,” Key laughed. Minho remembered feeling embarrassed when the group would be on stage at variety shows surrounded by other idols in suits while he was dressed in a tank top.
He would whisper to Key, “Hey, this is so embarrassing. What should I do?” And Key would reply, “It’s okay. Act like you don’t care.”
Things changed for the boys after the release of “View”. The album it was attached to, “Odd”, sold over 165,000 copies in South Korea only one month after its release. In 2019, Billboard named it one of the greatest K-Pop songs of the 2010s. But on a personal level, this is the album that gave SHINee a seat at the table in directing their own careers. This was a pivotal moment for a group that, as Key once described, was “made” by their label.
“View” gave SHINee their autonomy. The song’s success allowed the boys to set themselves apart as a group who were willing to take on risks and shake up boundaries in a genre that at times felt homogenous.
Years later Key would remember the euphoria and pride he felt as they debuted the song. “Going onstage with those outfits for the first time,” he reminisced. “I recall thinking, ‘This is SHINee. We're back.’”
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