Singer-Songwriter ABOUT Once Felt He Was Cursed. Now He Sees His Potential.
Hyun Park
For the past ten years, Korean singer-songwriter ABOUT has written horror stories.
These stories, which often evolve from a traumatic childhood, have always found a way into the singer’s music. “I always say that my music is ‘cry together music’,” he told me this week over Zoom in New York. “It’s okay to be too much. That’s what my music is for. I love to talk about this kind of uncomfortable subject matter,” he said. “Especially in Korea.”
Look no further than ABOUT’s latest single “When You Die”, a song that expresses the kind of melancholy he likes his music to languish in. It’s dark and penetrating with lyrics that can cut you. But there is a versatility to ABOUT’s music too. He’s an accomplished composer and vocalist for the music that soundtracks Korean dramas, known abroad as K-dramas; a writer with a keen eye for mining pain into catharsis chasing release. His most impactful releases have occurred in the past three years, when he released what he calls The Empathy Trilogy.
ABOUT’s mission in music is for his listeners to know that they are not alone with their emotions. His albums are soft, contemplative bodies of work that recall a childhood of loneliness, and eventually, a freedom from the expectations of others. ABOUT credits this with an intense anxiety or paranoia of what awful thing is always around the corner, lurking in the shadows.“Before something happens, if you create horrible stories, it makes you feel better,” he explained. “When you listen to my music, you don’t need to be happy. You don’t need to be sexy. You don’t need to be in a relationship or have a lover.” He continued passionately, “Be too much with me in my music and with my lyrics. Do nothing. Daydream.”
ABOUT’s music is a reminder to lonely, isolated people that you’re not alone. That our feelings, as explosive or as scary as they may feel, are there for a reason: To remind us that we are human. “There were no people like me when I was growing up,” he told me. “Nobody said, ‘I’ll make money with my type of music; with my feelings.’”
So, ABOUT took a risk and decided to be the one who made music with his feelings. He knew if he sounded crazy, it was a diagnosis he knew all too well.
Hyun Park
Korean culture can be punishing.
Buried deep in the psyche of many Koreans is the idea of han. Writer Euny Hong remembered how her mother described han to her once as, “When sad things happen not by your design but by fate, and over a long period of time.” Han is embedded into Korean culture for a number of reasons: the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan in the 1930s which led to thousands of Koreans losing their names and language. The Korean Armistice Agreement that split the North and South apart, tearing apart families and lineages. A patriarchal culture that is shaped by Confucianism with reverence given to men, albeit a particular type of man: one who is tough and extreme.
Throughout all of these traumas, han has endured; sinking its teeth deeper into a society that doesn’t encourage its people to question the feelings that come with it. “To be Korean, then, can also be to live with this anxiety about what it is to be Korean,” culture writer D.O. Kwon once wrote. Or, as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha stated in her book “Dictee”, Koreanness is “the decapitated forms. Worn. Marred, recording a past, of previous forms. The present form face to face reveals the missing, the absent.”
Growing up ABOUT remembers feeling like he was never given the space to feel sad. “Korean culture doesn’t know how to treat sadness or anger or cranky emotions,” he told me. “In my music I’m trying to represent those people who love to listen to sad-ass music when they’re really low and down.”
Being a tough boy was the standard when ABOUT was growing up. There was a slogan ABOUT remembers hearing in his youth directed at boys like him: “Be positive for your future,” he told me his voice laced with skepticism and false hope. Don’t let the negative energy bring you down. If you’re feeling tired, keep going. But ABOUT didn’t want to keep going; he was tired.
Perhaps this came from home. ABOUT was raised by his grandparents, but he tells me he was too young to understand the implications of this arrangement. While other classmates came from stable homes with married parents and money for fun, ABOUT’s life was fragmented. At school, he had to learn to fend for himself. “The reason I really loved isolating myself in school was because there was no personal place for me at home,” he said
He was bullied often. “I didn’t understand why my parents were divorced; why people bullied me; why my classmates didn’t like me,” he told me softly. “I felt like I had a crack in my brain.” It was hard for ABOUT to understand how to be a friend, how to talk to strangers or even handle his own emotions. “I didn’t even have a friend until I was a freshman in high school,” he said.
ABOUT found that he could channel his pain into acting. “My first dream,” he told me, “was to be an actor.” He still vividly remembers the first time he saw Helena Bonham Carter, the gothic darling of Tim Burton’s horror films, in a magazine.” I wanted to be like Helena because she always played these crazy, manic characters,” he said with a smile. In the interview she was asked why she was always drawn to playing such dark characters. “And she answered, ‘Well, I really like playing them and I feel like I’m the best at them,” Then she added in a statement this was crucial to ABOUT, “And I feel alive when I’m doing it.”
ABOUT could relate to Carter’s rage, her ability to make us uncomfortable and feel on edge. They also possess a strange beauty that makes them prone to categorization as villains. Acting let ABOUT escape from the rotten violence of his everyday life, but he wondered if he could succeed. “With acting, your appearance is a huge part of your job,” he said. “And I realized that acting is the one thing that I really love but it’s not the thing that I’m really good at.”
His dreams started to dwindle when a teacher told him, “Not everyone can be the main character.”
Hyun Park
Though ABOUT wanted to be an actor, he had been making music in some form since he was 12. “I first made music just to talk to myself,” he said. But eventually music became an outlet, and eventually, a way to act. He could be, he learned, the Helena Bonham Carter of music – with no one telling him he was too much. “I realized when I’m singing my songs that they’re all different types of metaphors for my emotions. I’m acting on stage,” he described. “I want to feel alive and cry on the stage. I want to be angry and speak out with my songs and lyrics.”
ABOUT considers The Empathy Trilogy to be the best music he’s released, and his favorite. “I wanted to be selfish with ‘Empathy,’” he said. “I wanted to release this whole story in this form. This is what it has to be. There is no other plan. Eventually it turned out to be a good decision.” On “Empathy” ABOUT decided to express everything he had bottled up for years. This was important to him. “I’m always using pieces of my trauma in lyrics. But until then, I only expressed 10% of that trauma.” When he chose to release the album, he asked himself, “Have you never wanted to be 100% truthful in your music?” He continued, “I didn’t do this for popularity or for money. I thought about myself and being a human. That’s how ‘Empathy’ was released.”
His lyric’s brutal honesty connected with listeners who felt just as lonely and isolated as he did growing up. Soon, his inbox and Instagram comments began to fill up with stories from listeners who talked to him like they were writing in a diary. “Those moments when fans connect with me, it makes me realize I’m doing what I need to do,” he said.
When I asked him what he hears today when he listens to the first EP “Miserable”, he paused. “I’m still really happy that I properly described my definition of love at the moment with [the singles] ‘Ashtray’ and ‘Why Did You’,” he said. “‘I never thought Miserable would be popular in Korea.” Often, he would think, “Who is going to listen to this?” So much money had been spent on the recording, the artwork, and the mixing. What if no one cared? But that record is beloved.
Being an independent artist has its own challenges. Though ABOUT answers to no one, every part of the final product falls to him. And while he often felt like his destiny to be an artist was predetermined, this magnetic force was something he had no control over. “After ten years as an artist, I’ve realized that this is how it feels to have no backup plan. There’s no way back to a safe point. It used to feel like I was cursed to be born with this personality,” but late last year after watching the movie Babylon, his outlook began to change. “I realized that I’ve been doing good and there is no reason to feel cursed,” he said.
ABOUT is haunted by the fact that he escaped his hometown. “Our town was really horrible,” he said softly. He knows what became of his childhood bullies, but sometimes he feels uneasy that he was able to pull himself up out of the muck and mire, while others couldn’t. Call it survivor’s guilt if you want, but it brushes up against ABOUT like a menacing, cold wind. “I always feel kind of sad about what is going on with them because we grew up in the same town, we ate the same thing, we went to the same school, but the result of our lives is different.” But he knows this: “We can’t choose who we want to be in that classroom.” Who we were as kids, I agree, was not always our decision.
ABOUT’s music attempts to put these fragmented pieces together. How did he wind up in New York? What about his drive to be heard transformed his pain into poetry? I told him I understood. “All of my childhood friends were fucked up,” I said. “We were all fucked.” Some of them, I said, are still in horrible situations. How did we persevere? Sometimes I feel guilty that I left them behind.
“When I look back at my past, I’m really surprised that I survived. I’m surprised that I got to this point in my life as an independent artist. I’m really proud of myself when I get long letters and comments from my listeners talking about themselves,” he said. This week ABOUT released “RISE AND FALL”, a beautiful melancholy song, as part of a year-long project that will focus solely on single releases.
“It’s been ten years since I decided to jump into the music industry and now I realize that the reason I survived till this moment is because I lost so many opportunities. I felt so underrated,” he continued. “But when people accept these parts of me, I feel alive and like everything is worth it.”
