I N N E R C I R C L E

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5.

Being an underground rapper for quite a while, bars and pubs didn’t actually faze me. I was quite a drinker too, back in the day before signing up to be one of those faces printed in magazines for teenagers and advertisements for school uniforms.  If anyone has asked me, do I actually want to be an idol, it would take me more than a moment of reluctancy to say yes. It is true, music is my life. I want to express myself through music, but in this industry, being able to do music usually comes with a price. I used to be able to just write whatever I want, mix some beats, make a demo, create some mixtapes, and rap my heart out in those dark bars where poor kids like me hang around sharing drinks and cigarettes. When I was a kid, things were much easier. I didn’t have to think about money or future. All I did was burning the days away in my room recording with my friends and performing with a bigger group of friends, or once in a while, bigger groups of audience. I was a fish in a small pond, comfortable in my own skin, being able to do everything I love. But then I tried to swim to the river, and somehow ended up in the ocean. Now every single scale on my skin has to flare out all the time to protect myself.


I was Hugeboy Mino. I cursed and drank. I didn’t hang out with your boys next door or your school basketball team players. I didn’t have a dream – I goddamn lived it. At least until I was convinced that my life was unsustainable and that if I wanted to go further I would have to leave the underground scenes to debut somehow. To a teenage boy, at that time, when you think that you’re such a badass and so unique, this thought upset me more than anything else. Only sellouts do it. How can you leave your brothers behind to register for a life that is not your own just so that you can make money? Money is nothing, brotherhood and dreams are everything. I guess all the kids in my block thought the same way. As a matter of fact, all the kids at one point must have had this thought. We all think we are different, we all think the same.


In my life, I guess there were so many turning points. The mountains of effort I put on in order to walk away from debuting the first time, the despair I had when struggling with a ballad band that wasn’t going to make it, and the overwhelming shame of being a trainee all over again, competing with the boys much younger than I was to debut in an idol band. I was desperate as I went through those, but it all made sense. Life happened the way it was supposed to be. I used to think that if I work really, really hard, something is bound to happen, I should be able to get what I want. Guess what, life isn’t a series of causes and effects. As a matter of fact, you can work your damn off and all you can get is sands in your eyes. That’s how the world works, simultaneously, spontaneously, sometimes magically. Great people suffer to death. s run the nations. Dreams are crushed, love is conquered. But once in those millions moments, in one of many seconds you would spend, when you least expected, you would encounter something enchanted, something that you would never imagine, and because you never think of it, it becomes that much surreal.


Seunghoon. It gotta be him.


That was what I usually thought about when I was getting trashed at a strange bar far away from our boarding home. I always started with my existential crisis of who I am, who I was and who I used to be, and by the third drink, I would spit an impromptu rap while nodding my head along the beat of some cheap electro music, something about the cruelty and unforgiving nature of life. By the fifth drink, a wave of memories would come and drown me to the bottom of my glass, and I commiserated by ordering three more fireball shots. My whole existence would then turn into something extra-terrestrial as stars came up from nowhere and started dancing around me. Then someone would bump into me and I, with my drunken voice, much lower than usual, and my mixed up pronouciations, would ask them if they “really want to ing die,” and by that I meant, “you should pay more attention to where you were going”. One fight or two could happen, though rarely, because at that point, we were all drunkards. Oh, the stories you would tell after a night out in Gangnam.


“You shouldn’t drink too much like that.” Seunghoon would tell me whenever I drank a few drinks too many and started cracking silly jokes.


“I’m not that drunk, hyung.” I would grin, finishing up another shot while Seunghoon roll