Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Korean and international netizens have labelled IU a pedophilia-obsessed sociopath after reading the lyrics to “Zeze” and a quasi-analysis of the lolita concept on Pann by a supposed photographer.
No, seriously, that’s basically what is happening.
Etc.
I’ve honestly not been much of a fan of IU’s cutesy, quasi-ballad concepts in the past, so I certainly don’t have much of a vested interest in defending her almost daily for no reason, but I find some of the stuff put out there about her so odd to me.
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Here are the lyrics to her song, “Zeze”.
“It’s amusing,
Look at the tail of your lips rising,
I can tell by your laugh,
You’re definitely mischievous.
Ah, ah, your name is really pretty,
I want to keep calling it,
The things I cannot say,
Those bad thoughts are lovely.
With your small fingers,
You touch the sounds,
With that ticklish voice,
You sing those colors and landscapes, yeah.
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Put your lips on the leaves,
Don’t joke around,
You can’t hurt the trees, you can’t,
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Take the youngest leaf here,
Take away the one of a kind flower.
Climb up me,
Climb up me.
Like a flower bloomed,
Look at the two cheeks turned rosy,
You’re really innocent,
But you’re definitely cunning.
You seem transparent like a little child,
Something about you is dirty,
There’s no way to find out,
What it is living inside you.
Right now, above your head,
There may be a floating sun,
But I vaguely see,
Dark clouds filled inside you.
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Put your lips on the leaves,
Don’t joke around,
You can’t hurt the trees, you can’t,
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Take the youngest leaf here,
Take away the one of a kind flower.
Climb up me,
Climb up me.
I want to touch you one more time,
I wait for you here everyday,
Come and take everything,
I want to call for you.
I wait for you here everyday,
You sneak away,
But you’ll come to see me again tomorrow night.
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Put your lips on the leaves,
Don’t joke around,
You can’t hurt the trees, you can’t,
Zeze, hurry and come up the tree,
Take the youngest leaf here,
Take away the one of a kind flower.
Climb up me,
Climb up me.”
“Zeze” refers to the character from ‘My Sweet Orange Tree‘.
Unsurprisingly, IU doesn’t actually intend to sexualize the boy, rather she says she finds his duality interesting (which coincides with the theme of her album) and wrote it from the perspective of a jealous tree, as she explained in another interview on V app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmOpqJCTqt4&feature=youtu.be&t=42m35s
Of course, that interview doesn’t flow with the narrative, so it’s ignored, but overall it goes with the concept of her entire album quite clearly.
*As an aside, the “sexy” part is referring to something appealing or intriguing, not necessarily something she wants to have sex with. I feel like netizens accusing her of being a pedo are confused about this or are being purposefully obtuse. This is supported by the fact that she never calls the boy sexy but refers to the duality as sexy.
And here’s the Pann analysis of her accompanying lolita concept.
The books behind her are “Leon, Delicate, Discipline”
Leon is a famous film with a lolicon concept. Delicate is used to describe a “weak girl who is easy to be tricked sexually” in lolicon context. Discipline means an adult man disciplining a girl sexually. The three words are infamous clichés of lolicon.
White dress and messy hair
The photographer says these two pictures are clearly lolicon concept
She sings, “I’m going to be a moist woman” and pours milk on a doll in the music video. In the film ‘Leon’, Mathilda tells Leon, “you need to feed me with water if you want me to grow.” In this context, ‘water’ translates into ‘cum’. “Raising a girl with water” is an infamous lolicon cliché meaning “giving cum”.
Other than the fact that the interpretation of that line from “Leon” is a stretch and a half, I don’t get what there is to criticize here. The usage of lolita imagery is there not to promote it, but to subvert a lot of the connections that stuff has with her early image.
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If you look at everything she’s done at just face value, then yeah, she’s using a lolita complex, making lolita references, and sexualizing children.
…
And a lot of people sing “Born In The U.S.A.” as some kind of MURICA FUK YA nationalistic song, use “Every Breath You Take” at their weddings, and don’t get basically hundreds of songs about drug use or sex (“Follow Me” is one people sing gleefully).
I mean, I get why it’s perceived that way or why one might see it that way, I just see it as sort of missing the point.
The way I see it, the entire album is built around references to herself and her past image and how that contrasts with how she really is or was. One doesn’t even need to infer anything to come to this conclusion since she mentions it in the lyrics over and over and over again.
The fact that netizens keep mentioning things like her dressing up as a kid and continually post a GIF of her sucking on a baby’s bottle is the whole goddamn point. She’s not glorifying pedophila or the lolita image, she’s critiquing it and the people (like uncle fans) who wanted her to remain in a certain image and a certain way, thus boxing her in by only allowing her one image.
Rather than being damning evidence that she’s “problematic” because of her lolita stuff, it’s damning evidence that they don’t have the slightest clue what is being conveyed in ANY of this. She’s calling out exactly what they’re complaining about, and alluding to what those fans were actually supporting.
The fact they have all this lolita stuff pointed out to them now and are so disturbed by it being front-and-center is the point. It’s even more ironic that after she’s made it blatant, now people have started to recognize the problem with it, even though nobody spoke up about it before when she was underage and doing it. Funny that.
Look, a lot of songs and their lyrics and themes are open to interpretation, but this? The answers to these accusations are right in the goddamn criticism of her itself. “I’m going to be a moist woman” is a lyric the Pann post complains about, but it doesn’t mention the line before that is “I wanna be a child forever” while she’s sucking on the bottle. The whole point of that exchange is to reject the innocent, pure, baby-like image, and I don’t see how she could’ve made it more obvious, but people amazingly have still manged to miss that obvious point and god knows what else.
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Personally, I thought there were so many mentions, references, and allusions to her resentment over her past image and how a lot of uncle fans (and the nation at large) viewed her that it bordered on being heavy-handed. I thought she could’ve benefited from more subtlety and believed she had room for improvement as a songwriter, because at this stage in her maturity she was still too direct and not creative enough with it.
However, upon seeing the comments about her songwriting and the fact that only one other person in the whole comment section seemed to see what I saw, I’m just amazed. Amazed that I was apparently completely wrong about how obvious she was making everything. I mean, this wasn’t Nell taking a seemingly chill song about a walk through the forest and turning it into a song about how adulthood is misery because the joy is gone and leaving suicide as a potential option. So maybe there was a reason why IU had to be so direct after all? Then again, I’m not sure if appealing to the lowest common denominator is ever be an acceptable way to look at the creative process.
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But hey, maybe I’m totally off-base here and I really am in the overwhelming minority of people who can look at her concept/album objectively and come away with the impression I’ve spelled out above. Just seems to make sense to me.
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Update
People at Netizen Buzz are apparently gloating that the Korean publishing company of the book didn’t like what IU did with the work.
That’s not what I said though? More importantly, it wasn’t the point of me writing this article at all.
My reference to explaining what she said about the boy being “sexy” is simply to contradict the people saying she’s a pedo, which is why that’s in the title of the article itself. It seems like those people hung up on that just took what commenters wrote about what I said and assumed that’s what I actually wrote.
The main concern on the part of the publishing company is that they don’t like her interpretation of the song and how she’s using it to tell a story of her own. That’s not dissimilar from the many people who disagree with me on her usage/interpretation of the book/character for the album, which is fine, but I’m not entirely sure what Netizen Buzz is celebrating about other than the fact that the publishing company is putting an official tone to what they already thought or argued about and so they now feel validated, much the same that they are accusing Asian Junkie readers of doing.
Like I said in the original post, I figured people would see it differently and I don’t mind people not seeing this the same way or disagreeing, but the hysteria always struck me as odd and comical.
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In any case, I’m sure a forced apology or something is coming sooner or later cause they need to stop the tide somehow. Enjoy that, I suppose.
