LEE SUHYUN official YouTube channel
Kim Rieun: How can I treat myself better? It’s a question everyone faces, and one that’s hard to answer. The world throws seemingly unsolvable problems at us, and when it does, it can feel like we’re stuck in a never-ending tunnel. On her YouTube channel, AKMU member LEE SUHYUN offers up an unexpected but straightforward answer for finding the way out. “If you decide to live as a princess,” she says, “then you become a princess.” Everyone who works at her agency, Cemter of Inspiration, calls her Princess, but she doesn’t respond by pulling out a magic wand—she’s far more down-to-earth than that.
A day in the life of a princess is nothing special. On camera, she fiddles with a prickly slime toy on her desk without even showing her face, shows off her 40 crunchy squishies, and silences the notifications on her phone to enjoy eating some malatang solo on her birthday. What she enjoys and what she shows of that daily routine to the rest of the world is entirely her call. She values her alone time but still heads out to meet friends who want to celebrate her birthday with her. She sits in front of the camera without a trace of makeup, chatting easily with her guests, and when her subscribers are looking for clothes in larger sizes, she doesn’t recommend items “for looking pretty for other people” but brands “that show you haven’t given up on wearing cute, pretty clothes.” It isn’t glamorous outfits or magic wands that make you a princess, it’s living every day as the person you want to be.
In April, LEE uploaded a video about her “FLOWERING” project on her channel where she opened up about “what it felt like passing through that long tunnel” over the past two years. It wasn’t simply a process of losing the weight she’d gained while she was in a rut, but a record of facing herself every day after vowing “never to waste my life, my time, or my youth again.” Since then, the singer’s been filling her days with the things she loves—making purchases, eating food, working out, and sometimes sharing those things with the people who matter most to her. It’s a lot like a line from the film “Soul”—when it comes to life, she’s “gonna live every minute of it.”
“Back To Black” 20th Anniversary Edition (Amy Winehouse)
Kim Hyojin (music columnist): I’d venture a guess that for Amy Winehouse, music was something like a chance to live life over again. She couldn’t really get a handle on love, emotions, or anything else in her real life, but in her music, she could draw on her experiences and write a new story, reclaiming the right to her own interpretation of events. In that sense, “Back To Black” was a diary where she could be at her most honest and, at the same time, another world she occupied—one that made do-overs in life a reality. In real life, there’s no undoing a breakup, but in song, it can be endlessly repeated, carrying a different feeling and meaning each time.
The way she looks back on her life comes through clearly in the music, too. “Back To Black” borrows from 1960s Motown soul, doo-wop, and girl-group pop, but what’s inside is deeply personal and thoroughly of its time. Winehouse opens up and unloads about infidelity, regret, and self-loathing overtop upbeat rhythms. There’s post-breakup sorrow with a lively rhythm (“Tears Dry On Their Own”) and real self-destructive tendencies on playful soul music (“Rehab”). That juxtaposition of cheerful melodies and despairing lyrics creates a new way of experiencing familiar emotions.
The 20th anniversary edition of the album offers a closer look at the traces of a life relived through music, with the comparison the demo versions offer opening the door. In some cases, the final version heightens the emotion, especially on “Back To Black” and “Love Is A Losing Game.” Where the demos feel like they’re holding explosive feelings in, those same feelings pop off line by line in the finished songs. In others, a change of genre changes the emotional experience, as with “Tears Dry On Their Own,” which began life as a slow neo soul demo and ended up a bouncy Motown track. It turns out you can put a completely different face on the same breakup depending on the style of music.
The 2007 live recording from Paradiso in Amsterdam breathes new life into songs that were already done and wrapped. Of course, the newly released material doesn’t change how we understand Amy Winehouse’s music. What it does do is reconfirm the variety of rhythms and voices you can give to a single experience to relive it, and the fact that all that possibility was always right there in her songs. You can’t change the past, but there’s always new life being breathed into the music, the feelings always changing shape.
“Alchemised” (SenLinYu)
Kim Boksung (writer): “Alchemised,” the debut novel by SenLinYu, started its life as a fully fleshed-out “Harry Potter” fan fiction story. The original version took the famous novel series and branched off into an alternate universe with a different, much bleaker course of events, and that means two important things for would-be readers of “Alchemised.”
First, the book drops you right into a post-war setting, where alchemist and resistance fighter Helena Marino is locked up by characters given little backstory and is now being tortured. Part two of the book jumps back in time to fill in some of those gaps, but it’s still clear that this officially published version, which has ostensibly cut ties with the “Harry Potter” universe, is easier to understand when you’re familiar with J.K. Rowling’s work.
Second, this novel is billed as dark fantasy, and that is an apt description. Helena is trapped in a land torn by war, and even her love interest, Kaine Ferron, is her captor. “Alchemised” is rife with trauma on both personal and worldwide scales, but the persevering reader is rewarded with a rich story as a result.
This is a long read full of friends lost to bloody war, but Helena’s amazing perseverance makes sticking with the book worth it to find out how even someone who’s imprisoned and has had their memories wiped can fight back and find hope in the end.