“Yu Ree’s Forest”
Lee Minyoung: In the “Animal Crossing” games, you start out by welcoming new residents to your forest town. Singer-songwriter Choi Yu Ree, who’s always had a special fondness for this gentle world of tending to a community, befriending its residents, and trading local goods, made a forest of her own. On her talk show “Yu Ree’s Forest,” she takes on the role of resident rep, accepting applications and recruiting new residents. Season two’s fourth set of hopefuls is YOUNGJAE and JIHOON from TWS. The two applicants and their host share a lot in common, right down to their soft-spoken nature, leading the resident rep to quip during their calm, quiet conversation that “this is the first time I ever met people who talk quieter than I do.” Choi finds common ground through kind, empathetic talk of siblings, as well as their shared work as singers, slipping in a joke here and there. With YOUNGJAE, who doesn’t play “Animal Crossing,” she goes all in on the pitch, promising to invite him to her own island, Domado. With JIHOON, who says he’d rather dance than play the game, she gets strict about her rep role, telling him, “I’m afraid your request’s been denied.” Keeping things loose helps the conversation steer into deeper topics, too. When JIHOON opens up about his regrets from his performance at last year’s “Gayo Daejejeon,” Choi shares her own experience, telling him, “I mess up a lot too.” Even though they’ve only just met, the conversation flows easily, much like Choi’s lyrics, widely loved for how they echo everyday ideas with a voice that stays simple and unadorned.
It’s only natural, then, that in this forest, the conversation soon turns to songs. YOUNGJAE chooses “Words of Us” as a song he’d like 42 to listen to, thanks to the lyrics. Choi notes that it’s hard to find a way to fully express your feelings to your fans, so she’s impressed that YOUNGJAE chooses songs with that in mind. JIHOON, too, talks about how “there’s only so much encouragement and comfort I can offer to the rest of the group,” but adds that “I think there’ll always music to bypass that limit,” expressing gratitude to Choi for the days when her music stayed by their side back during their trainee years. For them, songs are a way of finishing what words alone can’t quite capture. That’s why the segment where they sing each other’s songs is when the conversation in the forest runs deepest. After YOUNGJAE’s live rendition of “Wish” and JIHOON’s take on “Four Seasons,” Choi responds with a cozy performance of the TWS song “Nice to see you again.” YOUNGJAE shyly offers up a rendition of the host’s then-unreleased song “Last Love” as a final appeal before she makes a decision on the boy’s applications, and she turns up her in-ear to listen close. After a mischievous fake-out, she of course welcomes them in. But the conversation doesn’t end there. As JIHOON says to close out the show, he wants to hold onto the good energy and pay it forward to 42 and everyone else. The conversation will become a song once more, finding its way toward whoever needs a little comfort.
“Charli xcx presents Music, Fashion, Film”
Seo Seongdeok (music critic): The 42-minute film Charli xcx released alongside her new album, “Music, Fashion, Film,” isn’t a music video. Covering every track on the album, it’s simultaneously a documentary and a visual album that juxtaposes her creative process, fragments of assorted footage, and talking directly to the viewer. As the film opens, Charli says she specifically wants people to experience her new album in this form. She also talks about why she started the project in the first place. “I love music and I love fashion and I love film, and it’s not that I’m an expert in any of those fields,” she explains. “It’s more just that they’re so intrinsically what my life is about.” Just as “BRAT” was a statement distilled into a single color before it was ever an album, “MFF” is a confession woven together from pieces of film.
Charli speaks candidly about self-reflection and the emptiness of fame, both central to the new album. She bitterly asks whether shopping isn’t really about buying things at all, but about searching for a new identity. Discussing the idea behind the “Camera” music video with the director, she describes the song as being “about the relationship between performer and camera that is sometimes really tempting and exciting, but also can sometimes be unbelievably vulnerable and actually a bit embarrassing.”
If you look at the new album purely as a stylistic shift, it seems like the party girl “BRAT” persona has simply been replaced with that of a rock star, but Charli seems to have decided rock was the sound best suited to capture the uncertainties and emptiness of life as a pop star. In the end, this is an album that differs in theme, style, and form. There never could have been a “BRAT 2.” As she says in an interview with “Rolling Stone UK,” it’s not creatively rewarding to make the same thing twice.
“Dogs and Monsters” (Mark Haddon)
Kim Boksung (writer): This literary short story collection from novelist Mark Haddon isn’t afraid to get lost in the dark or brush against violence. The main hook is its modern, updated retellings of Greek myths, drawing on the gods and monsters like the Minotaur but reworking them from their original pathos-filled lessons into more open-ended questions about our sometimes dystopian present. The stories, which also take inspiration from more contemporary (but today considered classic) authors, look at (im)mortality and (im)morality, sci-fi and the ordinary, but always with an eye on humanity. The title may be “Dogs and Monsters,” but the stories seem to ask whether some of its characters are more like animals or something much worse. Still, Haddon is empathetic as always in his writing, with love a recurring theme threading each tale together, even if the endings leave the reader with more questions than answers.